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> What happens when one group of investors, call them the virtuous, simply won’t own a segment of the market (the sin stocks)? Well, in economist terms the market still has to “clear.” In English, everything still gets owned by someone. So, clearly the group without such qualms, call them the sinners, have to own more than they otherwise would of the sin stocks. How does a market get anyone, perhaps particularly a sinner, to own more of something? Well it pays them! In this case through a higher expected return on the segment in question. This may be unpleasant but it is just math (like math could ever be unpleasant). In the absence of extra expected return the sinners would own X of the market segment in question. The only way to get them to own X+Y is to pay them something more. Now, assuming nothing else changed, how does the market assign this sinful segment a higher expected return? Well by according it a lower price. That is, if the virtuous decide they won’t own something, the sinners then have to, and they have to be induced to through getting a higher expected return than otherwise. This in turn is achieved through a lower than otherwise price.

Quibble: the sin stocks could stay at the same price while the virtue stocks have an inflated price.

> Put simply, if the virtuous are not raising the cost of capital to sinful projects, what are they doing? How are they actually affecting the world as they wish to? If the cost of capital isn’t also an expected return, what is it? This might be a painful reality to swallow for the virtuous. To get precisely what they want, which is less of the bad stuff occurring, they have to pay the sinful investors in the form of a higher expected return. 16 Importantly, this isn’t an accidental byproduct of ESG investing. It’s the only way all this really matters one drop to the central issue – how much bad stuff happens. If the discount rate used by sinful companies isn’t higher as a result of constraints on holding sinful stocks then there was no impact. And, if the discount rate on sin is now higher, the sinful investors make more going forward than otherwise.

There's also a good section, earlier on, about how you can't get an advantage by constraining your investing (b/c, if it's an advantage, the unconstrained investor will do the same thing). So it's ridiculous to claim virtue investing gives you equal or better returns. (That's true mathematically, but one could claim there is a market failure where most people aren't recognizing the long run advantages of virtuous companies, so investing in them gets you better returns compared to unconstrained investing combined with foresight errors. In other words, virtue investing is what *you* would do if you did unconstrained investing, but not what the *typical* person would do, because you're smarter than them.)

All these points are pretty much independent of whether you conflate virtue with leftism/environmentalism/SJWism (as "ESG" investing commonly does) or not.

Obama, like many "leaders", has no real control over what he says publicly or what the leftist agenda is. In 2003, he tried saying we should do more to promote marriage in order to reduce gun violence. He got attacked from the left and shut up about it. He's a panderer and trend-follower.

Documentaries about Greece are generally nice. Most of this one is pretty good.

It has a huge inaccuracy, though. It presents all the Greeks including the Athenians as being equally bellicose, and presents Athens as starting the Peloponnesian War, abruptly, because Pericles wanted more power and glory for Athens. wtf?

People are so concerned with correlations and think that correlations speak for themselves. This is connected with induction, which basically says the data can speak for itself.

Inductivists and correlationists both make the same mistake of paying selective attention to some particular patterns/data/whatever, and some particular possible cause, without much thought to the infinitely many alternatives.

Another related issue is "the future (likely) will resemble the past". This inductivist motto is also a standard part of believing a correlation in the past will hold in the future. Actually, the future always resembles the past in some ways and differs from the past in other ways, and it takes thought (including explanations and criticisms) to figure out which are which.

> A user posting on reddit and in the MacRumors forums has given a detailed account of their findings and attempts to circumvent the throttling previously discovered on the new MacBook Pro 15" models featuring the six-core i9 Intel CPUs.

> The user goes on to explain that one of the internal power limits set for the device may not be appropriate for the power draw of the CPU and identical to previous MacBook Pro models, causing the power delivery chip (known as a voltage regulation module, or VRM) to report an over power condition that forces the clock of the CPU down to scale back power. This sets up the same conditions to allow throttling to occur once again.

> These conditions may be presenting themselves due to the new six-core design of the i9 CPU featured here. While Intel increased the core count of the CPU, they did not increase the thermal design power (TDP), or the amount of dissipated power manufacturers should plan to have to cool for a proper CPU design. This is an issue because this number usually reflects normal usage, and does not account for turbo modes. It's also likely it can exceed the draw of previous four core CPUs given the similarity of clock speeds and process nodes they are featured on.

> A method for tuning this limit is provided in the post, but it requires executing a command manually or via script each time the computer boots, and would likely void the warranty if Apple technicians discovered it. Still, the user posts results of benchmarks showing successive runs with no throttling. Manufacturers will always quote likely reduced component lifetimes if used outside of their specifications, but the results appear stable, and there is no thermal throttling of the CPU, the original suspected cause of this issue.

> This fix will not address total system power draw becoming excessive, such as long sustained loads from the CPU and GPU, but it is possible Apple could issue a fix similar to the one outlined in the reddit post that is stable.

> As for whether this issue is related to the hardware design of the MacBook Pro, that is possible as well. While iFixit's complete teardown of the current 15-inch MacBook Pro is not yet available, the previous teardown reveals significant differences in the VRM chips that power the GPU and CPU of the device.

> GPU power components

> The GPU power components seen above are on the top side of the logic board near the GPU die, and thermal grease can be seen on the components, indicating that they interface with the heatsink in the device. This is in contrast to the same components for the CPU, which are featured on the rear side of the logic board with no thermal interface to the top of the package, as seen below.

> CPU power components

> Additionally, the publicly available data sheets for these parts indicate more differences that suggest their thermal profiles will be different. The International Rectifier part for the GPU features a lower thermal resistance, meaning it can better dissipate its heat to the surrounding areas (board, air, heatsink) than the Intersil part for the CPU. Additionally, it boasts a higher power efficiency, meaning it dissipates less power itself to deliver the same amount of power as the Intersil part.

> Along with the heatsink path provided for the IR parts, it's clear they will not be capable of driving the same amount of load in any sustained mode. This makes sense given GPUs can see high loads for longer periods, but this could be an area of improvement for future MacBook Pro models from Apple, especially since it has typically chosen GPUs with very similar thermal design power limits (TDPs) to the CPUs in its MacBook Pro line.

> Some conservatives have double standards on what jokes they think should destroy people's career. The double standards are compatible with appeasing lefties

Oh shit. So I'm reading along and it's like the Never Trumper attacked Roseanne but defends the leftist who wrote *much* nastier tweets. And SE Cupp too. OK, whatever. Awful people being awful.

Then next it's Ben Shapiro!

> Minicon Ben Shapiro, another opponent of Trump during the primaries, is also among Gunn defenders. Shapiro acknowledged Gunn’s tweets were “loathsome” but said “that doesn’t mean he should have lost his job at Disney”. [Should James Gunn have lost his job at Disney? Daily Wire, July 20, 2018]

> Roseanne, however, was different: “Roseanne played herself in the series, so when she made a new racist reference about Valerie Jarrett, her persona was inseparable from her character,” Shapiro wrote. “Roseanne was Roseanne.”

Crap, I thought Shapiro was better than *that*. No wonder he no longer works with David Horowitz and Truth Revolt.

> I am 100% sure that Basileus has been accused of rape... by the women he raped. It's the only explanation for his fevered worry.

What a nasty comment.

FF, your posts would be better with some quotes of good parts. Clicking that many links (and not really being sure what order stuff goes in or how it started) is confusing and unappealing. Plus the feminists are awful so I don't want to read through what they said, but a few quotes or a summary of what to learn from it could interest me.

> In every academic study, one of the most common kinds of false accuser is a teenage girl who tells her parents she was raped to avoid getting in trouble. Unwanted pregnancy is sometimes cited by such girls, but the reason can also be trivial; the phrase “missed curfew” shows up with disturbing frequency in these cases. As a rule, it’s the parents who insist on getting police involved. Two different studies have found that almost half of all false rape complaints are lodged by someone other than the alleged victim, usually a parent.

> Another kind of case which evaporates rapidly is that of a person who falsely reports a rape in the hope of getting needed medical care or psychiatric medication; in one study, six of the 55 reports classified as false by a police department in one year fit this description. Like the teens who missed their curfew, these false accusers have no interest in pursuing charges after the lie has served its purpose.

That's plausible. The article seems like feminist propaganda though. It downplays the frequency and consequences of false rape accusations.

#10421 I could do that. There are some downsides, like it involves hidden stuff and people suck at computers, and expanding stuff is an extra step, and once there are more articles it'd require article categories for them all to fit on one page.

#10420 You're paying selective attention to people who are putting effort into not learning from you. 99% of people need to learn a ton. Try to help someone who wants to learn (yourself or others). If we could help the top 10% of people a lot, then there'd be way more people to help the other 90% later.

Good video. Lauren Southern tries to talk to some protestors but they won't discuss, they just want to flame her. LS asks for evidence and what they come up with is that she disagrees with them (not joking).

Replying to the video, Count Dankula says:

> Imagine raising a child and showering it with affection, pouring your heart, soul and love into it's upbringing and wishing it all the best of luck in accomplishing great things.

> And then it grows up to be one of these window lickers.

Being an SJW is not a random event. It doesn't just happen to your kid due to bad luck. If you parented better, it won't happen.

Stop sending your kid to be indoctrinated at leftist schools – and forcing him to keep going when he doesn't like it – and making other massive parenting mistakes. Parents are usually responsible for their kids growing up to be awful people.

The occasional murderer, you can blame bad luck. Maybe 100,000 parents all raise their kids to have a 0.0001% chance to be a murderer and you parent just as well as them and get unlucky.

But if and a bunch of other parents raise your kid to have a 50+% chance to be an SJW in high school or college, you're a bad parent. That isn't bad luck, it's you raising a kid who is bad at thinking.

BTW if you live in a gang area, and you have a kid, and you don't have a plan for how to parent different so he doesn't become a gang banger, and he becomes a gang banger ... that's your fault.

> the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even *after* learning that it was a designated terror organization.

Hoplite (iOS, Android) is a great strategy game. It's designed well to make combat interesting. You choose some special powers and fight 4 types of enemy. You have limited ability to kill things at long range so you have to dodge around a lot and approach intelligently.

I played a bunch a few years ago. He improved the game balance and added new challenge levels. I think he generated thousands of them with software to make a random 3 levels + different set of special powers.

I got to very high level before using protection (can only take one damage per turn, IIRC) and longer range jump (4 instead of 2). he nerfed those hard (protection removed entirely, and the jump distance reduced to 3). he also nerfed the other protection ability i used, shielding bash.

the game balance is better and fairer now. here's my current idea about the best build for the regular game:

you start with 3 hearts and get 15 shrines to pray at (= 18 points max). each one gives you either a heart or a power (and some powers subtract hearts, e.g. agility takes away 1 heart and also you're giving up a heart by choosing it instead of a heart, so the overall cost is 2).

it'd be nice to have 3 hearts and reduced shield bash cooldown. but i don't know what else to drop. i was using shielding bash before but i found mighty bash + reaction is better than shielding bash level 2, then i found 5range beam is better than level 1 of shielding bash.

the most optional stuff in my build is mighty bash and the mana talents. i think reaction is really necessary if you don't have shielding bash. in my current game right now i'm missing bloodlust so i have 4 hearts. it's hard to get the exact build you want cuz sometimes the shrine you need doesn't spawn. i've been doing alright but i think the extra 6 mana per kill would be good. i think it's significantly better than the +20 max energy.

i choose the slash jump talent thing over deep lunge b/c it makes a lot more leaps kill something. the way it works is you get one kill (often with beam) and then you do a leap that kills something, and then you use the free action from leaping to get a third kill to trigger agility to get another free action.

so it's like: beam, leap, free action, free action (the leap and first free action have to kill stuff). this is really powerful and lets you get some kills safely without getting hit, even when there are lots of ranged enemies. range 5 beam means you have as much range as the enemies, so if you shoot in a direction you're always safe from that direction instead of leaving one ranged guy who was out of range and can shoot back.

mighty bash makes you go back 2 squares from reaction with you do a bash. this is bad sometimes but often it helps you get to safety. i think it's good overall. and knocking bombs (or enemies) forward 2 squares is usually better than 1.

another big thing is you can leap to where ranged enemies can hit you and then beam them with the free action. without swift leap, you can't take the initiative to approach them. being able to take the initiative is really important. if you start a level by playing passive, it's risky. sometimes the ranged people will just point everywhere and you'll get in trouble. if you start clearing some guys out immediately before they all converge on you, then it's safer.

I got this exact build this time (sometimes you get the wrong prayers – especially sometimes wizard beam isn't available on level 8 and then you just have to reset i guess. or try a build with the ability to teleport to your spear? i think recalling your spear to your hand and plant spear are awful, but teleporting has some potential. it's hard to kill of it without being able to lunge with no spear though).

I'm around level 40. I've been hit twice. One of them could have been avoided if i had shielding bash level 1. i forget what the other one was. i might have just done it for convenience. you can play more aggressively if you just take a hit, and you heal it when the level ends anyway. i've been avoiding getting hit just as a goal, but sometimes it's just easier to get hit once.

i think i only used greater energy once. i ran through the level aggressively. i probably could have done something else without it.

maybe instead of 20mana and mighty bash, it'd be better to have shielding base level one *and* reaction. reaction is good because the ranged guys generally try to aim at you, so standing still while bashing is bad, whereas moving often dodges stuff.

i'm not sure how bad it would be not to have mighty bash. mighty bash is sometimes bad.

another option is to play with one heart and give up the ability to let something hit you and heal it with the fleece. i think that'd be bad because i could never jump somewhere a bomb would hit me, and i seem to need to do that occasionally. (bombs are one of the bigger threats because they hit you after you jump before your free action, and they can cover a large area that's hard to jump away from).

maybe instead of shielding bash, you just drop +20 energy for a third heart (because the heart is cheaper, so you can keep mighty bash). then you can take an extra hit sometimes and earn it back later. it's sort of like shielding bash but you can only use it once (let something hit you on a level where you already took a hit) until you get a level with no damage to heal back up. running low on energy is rarely a problem with bloodlust. sometimes it is though. i just remembered there was one level where i almost got screwed, in addition to taking a damage (shielding bash would have prevented it), i also got really low on mana that level and had trouble getting kills. i believe a bomb killed an enemy and gave me 6 mana back to just barely let me get a jump back, but i might not have really needed it anymore at that point (i might have been safe already).

i use mana aggressively and i usually regen a ton and it's fine. also being able to use bash instead of retreat (due to shielding bash), or just take an extra hit, would sometimes let me regen extra mana. so i now think the +20 mana talent might be a mistake, and a third heart might actually be better (a third heart isn't amazing either, so this is a close call).

i need to keep going and see how much harder it gets and get more used to later levels. being able to fit shielding bash in would be good but i don't know what else i could drop besides maybe mighty bash. reaction could only be dropped if i got level 2 shielding bash. i guess 5th range isn't absolutely required, it's really nice though.

> Canada: “Mentally ill” Muslim found “not criminally responsible” for STABBING three soldiers in army recruiting centre, “ALLAH told me to do it”: He is allowed to return to his community. Sickening. http://dlvr.it/QcvsGV

Also a world where people don't make such a big deal out of GPD since, as is well know, it's a crappy, misleading, flawed stat. Use some better stats. Or if your only stats are terrible, don't use them and just admit you don't know.

Progress would certainly more than double if we had pretty pure capitalism and minimal government. 10% wouldn't even be that would. There's way more than a factor of 3 loss from the destructive policies we have now.

> WORCESTER, Mass. — A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. "I'm really scared to ask this," she begins. "When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N-word, and I'm in the car, or, especially when I'm with all white friends, is it OK to sing along?"

> The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal "no."

> The exchange was included in Marlowe's presentation to recently arriving first-year students focusing on subtle "microaggressions," part of a new campus vocabulary that also includes "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings."

> Perhaps the buzziest money-loser of the year is MoviePass, which has upended the film industry by essentially giving away millions of free movie tickets. Until recently, MoviePass members could pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription that allowed them to watch up to one movie per day in theaters, with MoviePass paying the face value of the ticket on a preloaded debit card. Since the average cost of a movie ticket in the United States is around $9, going to just two movies per month resulted in a good deal for the customer, and a loss for the company. (MoviePass has started placing more restrictions on which films its customers can see, perhaps in an effort to trim costs.)

> MoviePass’s business model — which Slate described as “creatively lighting money aflame in order to subsidize the movie-going habits of some 3 million customers” — has turbocharged its growth. And the company maintains that it can make money by striking revenue-sharing deals with theater chains, or charging movie studios to advertise inside its app

> The problem is, of course, that parents are not the ones who would actually be subjected to my interventions. The children, my patients, don’t get to choose. And it isn’t fair to treat parents’ worry through the vulnerable bodies of their children.

> Both groups got better. The antibiotics didn’t work any better than the placebos, though. Placebos are highly effective for many conditions, and have been shown to enact neurophysiological change in patients exposed to them. That is, placebos can change your brain. The reason that new drugs are tested against a placebo is precisely because placebos work so well—if a drug is more effective than a placebo, it’s pretty good.

In general, I'm highly responsive to requests, but not very responsive to unstated preferences that people seem to want me to guess and then act on (while they, often, would deny it being their preference, even as they would be upset if I didn't act on it).

I think this is a good policy. I am open to criticism about this policy. But the people who dislike this policy aren't exactly the types to state criticism...

> “Absolutely. The main two differences between right-wing populism here and in Europe is that in Europe, even my right-wing brothers in Italy, they still look to the state for solutions. The question there is just who controls the state. Here, right-wing populism under Trump, Trumpism, is fundamentally different. It strives to take the state’s long tentacles out of the lives of working citizens.”

(Interesting tidbit at the end: Stefan didn't think Lauren going to Lakemba would be productive. He admits he was wrong. But what bad judgment he had in the first place! Good thing Lauren is there to be the brains of the operation.)

Maybe I should make pagination for comments. I don't like being forced into a paged view, but it could be a good *option* instead of making a new open discussion post periodically. It could be enabled only if there are 200+ comments, or something like that, and have a "show all" button right next to the page links (which would be at both the top and bottom of the comments section).

leftist ranting about Trump's victory. interesting. lots of blame on Hillary. says that the polls were wrong because "we" (the left) suppress people saying what they really think. says that lots of Trump voters weren't racists and flaming people doesn't win elections.

#10510 note the video presents itself as unscripted and off-the-cuff, but it's actually scripted. the speaker is an actor, but also genuinely is a lefty. (in my understanding from doing too little research to know much about him)

He's arguing with a lefty, and he concedes all kinds of false stuff, but he still argues some points about free speech and the use of ad hominem identity politics in debates, and he's *so reasonable* when he challenges the left (they are carefully limited challenges) and the lefty interviewer won't give any ground.

> We've said it before —we think Apple got hosed by Intel, when they were gearing up for the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure in 2015. We know that in 2015, Intel was promising delivery of 10nm process Core chips well before now, and even smaller by 2018.

> Coffee Lake is unapologetically still 14nm. Intel hasn't set a delivery target in seven years that it hasn't broken by months or years.

...

> Regarding MagSafe, we've been testing USB-C for a very long time at this point. On a melamine, Corian, or finished wood desk surface, the force required to pull out Apple's USB-C charging cable is about three-quarters of what it takes to break a MagSafe 2 connection, when the cable is pulled from less than a 40-degree angle from center on the horizontal plane, and less than 30 degrees from center on the vertical.

...

> Apple's service numbers that we've collated bear this out. MagSafe's introduction in January 2006 halved accidental damage service calls by 2009. There was no change in those numbers for MagSafe 2. But, in the two years since the MacBook Pro was released, there has been no increase in the accidental damage rate at all —and possibly a decrease, but we'll wait another year to fully declare that.

> The Middle East Forum (MEF) has decisively responded to a letter sent by Islamic Relief USA to members of Congress denying allegations made in a recent MEF report – and subsequently cited in testimony before the House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee – that outline the charitable franchise’s links to extremism and terror.

why does this matter?

> Founded in 1984 in Birmingham, England, Islamic Relief, with branches in over 20 countries, is the largest Islamic charity in the West. It has received at least $80 million over the past ten years from Western governments and international bodies, including the United Nations. It received more than $700,000 from U.S. taxpayers during the past two years. Its officials are members of government advisory panels, while Western cabinet ministers, European royalty, and Trump administration officials speak at its events.

an example of one the issues and what the debate is like, cuz jfc:

> MEF has now published its own response, showing that every single one of IR-USA’s denials is merely a sidestep or deception.

> IR-USA, for example, states that the Islamic Zakat Society (IZS) in Gaza, a key partner of the Islamic Relief franchise, “is widely known for its apolitical stance, and its board members and senior staff have no known affiliation with Hamas.”

> This is simply untrue. MEF’s response notes that IZS’s own website describes itself as “soldiers for Jerusalem,” and calls on Palestinians to “support the family of the martyr” and support the struggle for the “captive Jerusalem.” In 2009, IZS organized a student event at which the keynote speaker was Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, who declared that students would “return our lands to us” … through “jihadist force.” Top IZS official Hazem Al-Sirraj, meanwhile, is a prominent cleric in Gaza who studied under the Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In 2010, Al-Sirraj was the keynote speaker at a Hamas conference in Gaza for the “sons of Hamas,” including Hamas “founders, scientists, politicians and academics.”

full details are available at the linked article + the links at the bottom of it

> The ACLU did a publicity stunt in which it got Amazon's cloud facial recognition service to falsely identify US congressmen as criminals, by matching their pictures against a mugshot database. Amazon points out that machine learning is a probabilistic technology, that the ACLU set the tool to 80% confidence (not, say, 99%), and that the sample image set was biased, all of which is true but also, of course, the point: if you are not rigorous in thinking about what parameters you use and what bias might be in the data set, then you will get lots of inaccuracies. Machine learning is not magic, the computer can be wrong, and one should not take the results of any such system on trust. Equally, of course, claiming as the ACLU does that this is 'flawed and dangerous' is also to miss the point: it's a tool with probabilistic outcomes that you can use or mis-use, and more importantly understand or misunderstand. Link

> You'd think that listing the source would make tracking down the origins of the characters easy, but it's important to clarify what counts as a "source" - one of the more common sources for the ghost characters was the "Overview of National Administrative Districts" (国土行政区画総覧), a comprehensive list of place names in Japan. You might, as I initially did, imagine this to be a kind of atlas, an oversize book with at most a few hundred pages. It turns out the latest edition is a seven volume set with each volume having roughly nine hundred pages. Imagine tracking down a single character without a page reference.

...

> 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record "山 over 女". "山 over 女" occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn't print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake.

the style of *Human Action* (by Mises) is very slow and careful. very anti-*overreaching*. it’s an example of how far you can get while mostly just keeping it simple and not fucking up. he's constantly putting together simple, almost "obvious" stuff, using basic logic, and not straying further into harder stuff. yet he says a lot and corrects so many people.

#10521 it's a *great* book. a huge achievement. it's long and has a low error rate. most thinkers would have a hard time writing one page with that low an error rate without being boring/pointless, and Mises manages to do it consistently for hundreds of pages that have connections between the ideas (the pages work together, instead of being independent, which makes it harder).

"Omnipotent government" is a book by von mises about why ww2 started. I've read about 3/4 of it. It's a very good book. Its explains how socialism and interveventionism helped lead to the war. It's a lot better than the work of people who currently claim to represent him at the Mises Institute.

> IN dealing with the problems of social and economic policies, the social sciences consider only one question: whether the measures suggested are really suited to bringing about the effects sought by their authors, or whether they result in a state of affairs which—from the viewpoint of their supporters—is even more undesirable than the previous state which it was intended to alter. The economist does not substitute his own judgment about the desirability of ultimate ends for that of his fellow citizens. He merely asks whether the ends sought by nations, governments, political parties, and pressure groups can indeed be attained by the methods actually chosen for their realization.

I don't agree with Mises about this. I think economics **can** do this, and *commonly* does, and it's a great, valuable thing to be able to do. But I don't think it's the **only** thing economics and the social sciences can productively deal with and do.

> It is, to be sure, a thankless task. Most people are intolerant of any criticism of their social and economic tenets.

:) @ mises saying it. :( @ it being true

> They do not understand that the objections raised refer only to unsuitable methods and do not dispute the ultimate ends of their efforts.

The economic ideas and objections raised by Mises are helpful for people, like Rand and myself, who *do* dispute their ultimate ends.

I think Mises is mistaken to expect to be judged with such neutrality. His ideas have consequences. Those consequences are good for everyone in the same way Objectivism and TCS are, but I don't agree Mises is fully in a separate category (I can agree his work *partly* is). It's unsurprising for these things to be viciously opposed by people who don't understand them and see a threat.

> They are not prepared to admit the possibility that they might attain their ends more easily by following the economists’ advice than by disregarding it.

Mises is ignoring or underestimating or something the extent to which people have bad ends. Ultimately, in the long run, if they sorted out enough of the contradictions between their ends, and learned enough, and fixed enough of their static memes, and so on, we expect they would settle on Objectivism, capitalism, etc. but they don't know that and they aren't there yet and in the mean time they have all kinds of ends that are bad and which are incompatible with Mises' worldview. Right now they want X and Y. If they understood Mises, they'd stop wanting X, start wanting Z, and learn a better way to get Y. They see this as a threat to X, not a way to help them get X. It sorta is ... but they'd be better off in their own judgment in the new situation. But that's hard to understand.

Note: *If you don't like a book, stop reading it*. Ask a question about it, share a criticism, or try something else. If it's too difficult, *stop reading* and seek help or try something else. Reading books you don't like, or don't understand, won't help you. Book recommendations are a *starting point*, but it's up to you to evaluate the book for yourself after you've read some (specifically evaluate its value to you right now, not its value in general).

> “Educational institutions have the requisite expertise and the right to make the inherently academic judgments on how to set criteria for their student admissions and in particular, what kind, quality, or extent of diversity will best enhance the educational experience of students and allow those students to flourish,” they wrote. “It would be an extraordinary infringement on universities’ academic freedom to decree that institutions of higher education cannot consider race at all in seeking to obtain that diversity,” they said.

> Thanks to the pioneering work of Paul Meehl (and follow-up work by Robyn Dawes), we have known since at least the 1950s that very simple mathematical models outperform supposed experts at predicting important outcomes in clinical settings.

> A few months ago, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow asked me if I might review neoconservative #NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Suicide of the West. I value my free time highly, so I was pretty dubious—Jonah Goldberg, who has been a media-touted professional token Conservative for all of my life (he’s Gen X, I’m Gen Y), has never to my knowledge said anything interesting, and there are plenty of books I would like to read that are certain to be good. I promptly wrote back to Mr. Brimelow: “I just checked on Amazon and Jonah Goldberg's new book is 464 pages long. I wouldn't be willing to read that for less than a ridiculous sum that I wouldn't accept from anyone to just read a useless book and review it.” Mr. Brimelow dropped the matter after that, and the brilliant Paul Gottfried reviewed it for VDARE.com instead.

> Then, more recently, Mr. Brimelow emailed me a mixed review of the book [Jonah Goldberg’s Burkean Turn, June 26, 2018] by Matt Purple at The American Conservative and asked me again if I might review it. While I am aware of the longstanding tradition of writers shamelessly reviewing books without reading them (two brilliant writers, George Orwell and Joe Sobran, both did this, the former even writing an amusing essay about the practice.), I think this practice is detestable, and hope to never do it. So I replied to Mr. Brimelow: “Ugh. I'd be willing to write you an amusing polemical article-length explanation as to why I am not willing to read/review it. That's the best offer I can give.”

> Mr. Goldberg’s thesis, gleaned from reviews and his endless electronic media appearances, is that the biggest thing (if not the only thing) that makes “the West” great are our Enlightenment/Lockean/Classical Liberal values.

and these values are under attack by the tribalist left and the tribalist right, but good old Mr. Goldberg has figured out the golden mean of non-extremist values. (this is a joke b/c the golden mean is a pre-enlightenment greek idea)

> This argument is retarded because of mankind’s historical record between the late seventeenth century (when Mr. Goldberg marks the emergence of his preferred values), and the 1960s. During these 300 or so years, each and every Lockean, free marketer, Classical Liberal, and Enlightenment proponent was a “tribalist” by Mr. Goldberg’s standards—and “racist” by the standards of basically everyone alive today.

Nah, it's dumber than that.

what about greece, rome, and the renaissance? what about the magna carta?

#10543 the stuff you quote is amusing but it's kinda dumb too. he could read that book like 5 hours if he was good at reading (500 wpm). or he could have just read like a chapter, or started reading the chapter until he had enough quotes to yell at, or just skimmed around for interesting parts. with skill, he should be able to get plenty of quotes for an article in an hour (not a proper review article, maybe more of a fisking instead of just excuses for not reading it).

> The Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Labor announced an agreement Tuesday to work together in cracking down on companies that "discriminate" against U.S. workers by hiring foreign workers.

> The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the Labor Department will start sharing information on employers, refer issues to the appropriate officials at each department and offer training to each other’s staff under the agreement.

> Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore said in a statement that the agreement will help the civil rights division’s “ability to identify employers the favor temporary visa holders over U.S. workers who can do the job.”

> ADVERTISEMENT

> “Employers should hire workers based on their skills, experience, and authorization to work; not based on discriminatory preferences that violate the law,” he said.

> Rosemary Lahasky, the deputy assistant secretary for Labor's employment and training administration, said in a statement that sharing the information “will help protect U.S. workers from unlawful discrimination.”

> In the 1980s, the universities embraced two antithetical agendas, both costly and reliant on borrowed money. On the one hand, campuses competed for scarcer students by styling themselves as Club Med–type resorts with costly upscale dorms, tony student-union centers, lavish gyms, and an array of in loco parentis social services. The net effect was to make colleges responsible not so much for education, but more for shielding now-fragile youth from the supposed reactionary forces that would buffet them after graduation.

Apple reported earnings and the stock went up 5%. Mac sales were down, probably due to lack of updates to Mac models (MacBook Pros just got updated, but that was after the period reported; more updates will come this fall presumably).

Apple bought back lots of stock contrary to media fears. It has a low price/earnings ratio:

> "folks, remember the Mexican rapists? the famous rapists. i say some mexicans that are coming in are rapists, are bad hombres, and that's true, undeniable, and the media, the mainstream media, these lovely people back there *points*

> *crowd chants 'CNN sucks' for 3 minutes*

> ...oh boy, you guys are rough, rough stuff, how do you really feel huh? *chuckles and shakes head*

> Anyways so the famous rapists,

> *EXAGGERATED STIFF FORMAL VOICE*

> "Donald Trump said all Mexicans are rapists. Donald Trump said the Russians should hack the emails. Donald Trump Donald Trump*

> I've got it right here folks, oh boy, she's the newest hire for the New York Times. Listen, can you believe this? You're not gonna believe it. Sarah Jong, okay? Ms Jong, what does she say?

> Here's what she says on her tweets:

> 'Oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men'

> *crowd boos loudly*

> Can you imagine? I know, I know, terrible.

> Here's another one from Miss Jong:

> 'Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.'

> *BOOING INTENSIFIES*

> Amazing. New York Times Editorial board! *Trump waves papers* Was this her resume? Maybe it was her resume!

> I gotta read one more, okay, one more?

> Oh boy I can't even read this one, I see kids in the crowd folks, oh boy, well, I'll kinda reading it, okay? I'll kinda read it and you will get the idea. Not very presidential, but that's okay right?

> 'Dumbass....couldn't avoid that one, sorry, first word, don't know how else to say it....Dumbass f'n white people marking up the internet with their opinions...like dogs peeing and she didn't say peeing okay? but like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.'

> *BOOING INTENSIFIES FURTHER*

> It's a shame folks. And they complain when I call them the enemy of the people!"

> The Endogenous personality is the ‘inner’ Man; a person whose outlook on life is ‘inward.’ He is inner-directed, inner-driven, inner-motivated; one who uses inner modes of thinking, inner evaluations, in-tuition; one who is to a high degree autonomous, self-sufficient; one who is relatively indifferent to social pressures, influences and inducements.

And also says:

> Geniuses are altruistic, in the sense that their work is primarily for the good of the group; and not for the usual social rewards such as status, money, sex, and popularity.

This is silly. It says geniuses are self-oriented ... and that they work primarily for the good of the group.

>> You could propose that knowledge always existed and was never originally created. God is eternal. That's not satisfactory either.

> Why is that not satisfactory?

The context was the questions:

> *How can knowledge be created from non-knowledge? Where could knowledge come from originally?*

Saying it's eternal doesn't answer those questions. It's like half an answer to "originally" (answer: it didn't – but no explanation of how that's possible or what's going on there), and no answer at all to how new knowledge is created (by human intelligence, by biological evolution, etc).

If your goal is to explain how humans can think of new things like inventing spaceships, or explain where animal eyes came from (with their appearance of design), then saying "God is eternal" does not address the issue.

#10567 Thanks. I saw this as a variant of the question Christians typically ask about the universe, "Where did the universe come from originally if not God?"

To which my answer has been that we don't know. But God doesn't provide an answer either, since saying the universe came from God just pushes the question back one level: where did God come from?

They (Christians) find "God is eternal" to be a satisfactory answer to where God came from. I get stuck when they say it's satisfactory to them, and I say it's not to me.

I can anticipate a similar result with your answer about knowledge. They'd say something like "God is the explanation of how that's possible or what's going on there". And they'd say God is explained in the Bible, and I'd say it's an unsatisfactory explanation to me and they'd say it's satisfactory to them...stuck.

> not all companies are. github is kind of a tragic tale that's all-too-common in the valley of a well-meaning but naive white dork founder who gets browbeaten by the social justice crowd and continually caves to their demands until they finally decide to devour him.

> It started when some SJWs got upset that he had a rug in his office saying "In Meritocracy We Trust" which they claimed was their justification of 'white privilege' and an excuse for why there were so many white male engineers at Github. So they scrapped the rug and 'pledged to make changes' which really meant making diversity hires in a show of kissing the ring. Then there was this bizarre sexual harassment suit that got brought by one of the diversity hires that was ultimately revealed to be baseless, but by then the damage was done. because being accused of sexual harassment is almost as bad as actually committing it, he stepped down, and now people are claiming this whole thing is actually good for github because they're bringing in 'professionals' to 'clean up' the culture.

> What this will mean is: their best engineers will leave (the cream of the crop left long ago--these guys are very good at sussing out the social justice bullshit,) and the company will cling to life as it's overtaken by competitors. Github will be fine for a while before it begins its downward slide, however, and social justice types will parade around this as demonstrating how diversity/progressivism 'helps' companies.

i don't know, not a big TV watcher... i've seen some hannity, he's ok but not as good as tucker. and saw some bill o'reilly in the past, who was ok but not as good as tucker. others are generally awful, though i did largely enjoy stephen colbert's right wing persona (i think it's actually smarter than his real left wing persona).

> I can anticipate a similar result with your answer about knowledge. They'd say something like "God is the explanation of how that's possible or what's going on there". And they'd say God is explained in the Bible, and I'd say it's an unsatisfactory explanation to me and they'd say it's satisfactory to them...stuck.

it helps if you get more specific. by what *mechanism* does God explain human intelligence? God created the universe and the laws of physics, and then biological evolution created humans that are intelligent *somehow* (God's role is kinda indirect/limited and doesn't help explain how intelligence works)? God personally/directly created intelligence originally (explains the origins, instead of evolution) ... and then it works according to and within the laws of physics? by being a computer running software? or is God involved in our thinking at all times, and if he disappeared we'd lose our intelligence? like our brains are computers but God is constantly changing some of the data, while it's running, in order to help us get intelligent instead of non-intelligent thoughts, and without that interference our brain software wouldn't work? does God do that for animals too – e.g. for a wolf's purposeful hunting behavior – or only for humans? or is there some other mechanism? or maybe there aren't consistent laws of physics, we live in a magical world where the rules keep changing depending on God's moods or decisions or something, and yet our intelligence seems to consistently work anyway, which is because ... what?

> A vicious mob targeted the ICE office and even a food cart. The police followed orders to do nothing.

> Andy NgoAug. 3, 2018 5:24 p.m. ET

> Along the trolley tracks behind the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, a biohazard cleanup crew works under police protection. It finds used needles and buckets of human waste simmering in nearly 100-degree heat. The smell of urine and feces fills the block. For more than five weeks, as many as 200 people had occupied the site to demand ICE’s immediate abolition. They’re gone now, but a community is left reeling. Thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy will do that.

> A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19. They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent “guards” to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. “At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,” the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week.

> Signs called ICE employees “Nazis” and “white supremacists.” Others accused them of running a “concentration camp,” and demanded open borders and prosecution of ICE agents. Along a wall, vandals wrote the names of ICE staff, encouraging others to publish their private information online.

> Federal workers were defenseless. An ICE officer, who asked that his name not be published, told me one of his colleagues was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp. Later people showed up at his house. Another had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the “Gestapo.”

> Where were the police? Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”

> The mob set up camp behind the building, where they harassed journalists and banned photography. The open-borders advocates also erected an 8-foot wall around their site. I walked through and saw young children, including infants, in squalid conditions and 90-degree heat. Every American flag was defaced. Anarchist and communist flags were unsoiled.

> Stuart Lindquist, the ICE facility’s 79-year-old landlord, visited his property on June 21. “The political powers in the city of Portland have stopped the police from doing what they normally would do,” he told me. When he attempted to drive into the parking lot, occupiers swarmed and pounded his windows. In the commotion, Mr. Lindquist’s car struck someone in the mob, who wasn’t injured. His home address later appeared online, and he says the harassment hasn’t stopped.

> On June 28 federal police mobilized from out of state finally moved to reopen the office. They arrested a handful of people for refusing to leave the ICE office’s front, but the rest retreated to the camp and focused their vitriol on the officers. They repeatedly called a black officer “traitor” and “house n—.” They shouted that they knew where the officers lived, and published more addresses online.

> The same day Mayor Wheeler again pledged not to intervene. In a statement, he whitewashed the lawless behavior: “I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience.”

> The Hakes family, which owns the Happy Camper food cart across the street from ICE’s office, responded to the statement with incredulity. The mob “terrorized our family” and forced the business to close, Julie Hakes told me. Ms. Hakes showed me text messages from her 21-year-old daughter, Brianna, who ran the cart. “Just saw a drug deal,” Brianna reported early on. After members of the anti-ICE mob spotted her selling breakfast burritos to federal officers, the situation deteriorated. “Call me immediately!” Brianna wrote after being accused of “supporting the pigs” and “child deportation.” She said people wearing masks threatened to hurt her and burn down the cart, and the police never responded to their frantic calls.

> Randy Glary, a 52-year-old artist and longtime resident, was photographing the camp when he said a group of occupiers knocked his camera into his face. Charles Williams, a 62-year-old man who lives across the street, said someone threatened to stab him with an “AIDS-infected needle.” From his balcony, he saw the “thugs” begin masked street patrols. Others brandished sticks. Lisa Leonard, a 53-year-old disabled resident, said occupiers hit her on her head, disabled her electric wheelchair, and lifted her in the air when she complained about loud drumming. She called police, who took a statement but made no arrests.

> The locals who spoke to me all wondered why the city allowed this and ignored their calls for intervention. Peter Simpson, a public-information officer with the Portland Police Bureau, explained that “at the mayor’s direction, PPB involvement was very limited” until July 25.

> Back at the trolley tracks, the occupiers have been evicted but taxpayers will have to foot the costly cleanup bill. The Hakes family is still trying to recover. Brianna has decided to move out of the neighborhood. “They know my face and car,” she said. Like other residents I spoke to, she expects the mob to return.

> i don't know, not a big TV watcher... i've seen some hannity, he's ok but not as good as tucker. and saw some bill o'reilly in the past, who was ok but not as good as tucker. others are generally awful, though i did largely enjoy stephen colbert's right wing persona (i think it's actually smarter than his real left wing persona).

> what about online shows like crowder or levin? any great ones?

not that i know of.

if we're including podcasts I'd say Daniel Horowitz is great. His podcasts sometimes run pretty long so he can do like an hour plus on one topic. He goes into lots of detail on issues, history, policy, law, legislation etc. he has guests. he even had JEFF SESSIONS as a guest.

i don't know of any other really solid shows offhand. I haven't watched Levin (was paywalled last time i checked) and Crowder is funny but not super amazing imho

#10578 There are lots of good people in South Korea. South Korea has been economically productive. Jeong doesn't represent it. Culturally, isn't she more of an *American* leftist than anything distinctively related to Korea?

>> Popper had a mistaken view of the nature of induction. In essence, he tried to argue that inductions are formed by the observation of regularity in nature., i.e. the sun has risen each and every morning of my life so it should rise again tomorrow. That is not how induction works, induction works by identifying the causal reasons that the sun appears to rise each morning, i.e. the rotation of the earth on its axis relative to the sun - it is the discovery of that cause, that enables us, ceteris paribus, to be certain that the sun will rise . Also, rejecting induction is the rejection of any kind of knowledge. It is induction, after all, that provides the premises for deductive arguments. Induction is the means by which our perceptions are formed into concepts and then into propositions.

>> I would like to know what you believe is missing in Objectivism, if that is your claim.﻿

curi replies:

> Popper said there are many variations on induction. He directly addressed more than one, and he also gave multiple arguments covering the general themes of inductive errors. You propose induction works by identifying causality. This is a major break with what "induction" has meant in the history of philosophy. You do not say by what method you propose identifying causality, nor why you regard that method as inductive specifically. Saying that you identify causality by induction wouldn't cover what you do – what the steps are, how it's done, or how it avoids the logical problems that make other attempts at induction impossible that Popper explained.

> Ayn Rand wrote almost nothing about induction, and said she didn't have a solution to some of the problems with it. I don't know what work by some other Objectivist thinker you believe both addresses Popper (with quotes and details, showing understanding of what the problems Popper brought up are, and how to address them, as well as commenting on Popper's positive epistemology) and also provides a clear explanation of specifically how induction works and how to do it.﻿

> Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes has become the latest to say no to Alex Jones. The service has pulled down all of his podcasts and most offered by his network, Infowars. Apple hasn’t publicly explained the move, but Facebook recently suspended his profile for bullying and hate speech.

> I updated the FI book recommendations page by adding this paragraph:

>

> Note: *If you don't like a book, stop reading it*. Ask a question about it, share a criticism, or try something else. If it's too difficult, *stop reading* and seek help or try something else. Reading books you don't like, or don't understand, won't help you. Book recommendations are a *starting point*, but it's up to you to evaluate the book for yourself after you've read some (specifically evaluate its value to you right now, not its value in general).

> Also curious: Apple only removed Infowars from their podcast directory — the Infowars app remains in the App Store. Different standards? Seems hard to justify de-listing the podcasts for “hate speech” but leaving the app in place when it contains the same content.

DF said something true and notable instead of something evil and leftist :)

looks like apple claims ToS violation on the podcasts but didn't see a ToS violation for the app.

also:

> Apple has been clear that it takes its guidelines seriously, with Eddy Cue stating at South by Southwest last spring that "we do think free speech is important, but we don't think white supremacist speech or hate speech is free speech that ought to be out there."

Alex Epstein is starting a new podcast series. This one is about the need for knowledge in life, and the difficulty of differentiating correct and incorrect ideas (there are tons of things where good ideas already exist, you don't have to invent a solution yourself, but there are many contradicting claims and it's hard to know which ideas to listen to).

Episode 1 focuses on *stating the problem* and comments on some examples like nutrition and psychology. It's good. I have lower expectations for future episodes where he gets into solutions.

He's using a Facebook group as a discussion forum for people to talk about this stuff. Meh. I think it means he doesn't want real discussions. He mentions in the future there may be other options like YouTube comments (also not a discussion forum).

> The field of philosophy which deals with knowledge – its nature, reliability, methods of attainment, etc – is epistemology. Objectivism offers an epistemology with many good characteristics, but also including induction – which Ayn Rand openly said was problematic and that she didn't personally know the solution. No Objectivist has written a serious refutation of Karl Popper's criticisms of induction, nor of his solution to what to do instead in order to get and evaluate knowledge. This is a major problem and there are no Objectivist discussion forums to resolve it at. (There are similar issues with e.g. Kantian forums, but they also have so many other problems it's overwhelming and it's hard to figure out what to productively do about those clashes.)

> Although we will be suggesting revisions and improvements to the scheme, many psychologists currently suggest that personality can best be understood in terms of five essential personality characteristics: these are the ‘Big 5’, which each make a scale between extremes

> our placing on them predicts how we behave.

the big 5 sux

> For example, high Conscientiousness as a child predicts greater success in education and employment; high Neuroticism predicts problems with mood swings, anxiety and depression.

correlation isn't prediction.

these correlations are actually weak.

the correlations are between *scores on certain tests*, given labels like "Conscientiousness", and certain metrics of education and employment success. the metrics are incomplete, and some of them are basically what people self-report on a questionaire (as against better, more objective but still flawed metrics like salary).

> But in summary, the Endogenous personality, necessary for genius, is self-sufficient, indifferent to the opinions of others or normal social aims, being instead wrapped-up in his own personal goals, and making judgements using his own internal, subjective evaluation systems – he will work very hard and for long periods on his own projects, but will not willingly go-along with other people’s plans and schemes. But more on this later…

this is OK but it's not telling me anything i didn't already know. how about you reply now with quotes from some parts you think are good and that i'd want to read.

PS I like this comment by Mises about genius in *Human Action*:

> Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

> how does moderation work here? is there transparency for moderator actions? if you do anything wrong, do you get it explained to you, or just have to try to guess what's going on? is this mostly a free speech zone, or not? is criticism welcome? are unpopular views desired here or suppressed (the reputation system concerns me)?

> and why is there a filter on what words i can say? it claims to be a profanity filter but my original title did not contain profanity and my post was blocked anyway.

I guess the post will never go up:

At least one of Justin's two posts *did* go up on the forum, then was removed later, without explanation.

I've moved FI to the google group. The google group is now the primary group. I updated the FI website and both group websites. (I prefer people continue sending to both since the yahoo group has way more people, and for redundancy in case google loses/delays emails.)

> Anyone who knows Molyneux's past knows he has no problems nuking critics' YT channels or online forums he doesn't like and then use the excuse of harassment, racism, etc with no proof beyond his accusation.

> Unfortunately, Molyneux often ignores the need to cite his influences or give references. As a result, many of his followers today—who came into FDR as a result of his podcasts—mistakenly believe that most of the ideas discussed originated with Molyneux. Is it plagiarism? Well, Molyneux doesn’t specifically *claim* to be the author of those ideas. He simply discusses them—unattributed—with great passion and lets his acolytes draw their own conclusions.

> Today, he employs people to patrol his Facebook page, YouTube account, and forum, deleting information and user accounts that challenge his self-proclaimed role as the "salvation of philosophy" and the first man in history to give parents a moral framework for "peaceful parenting."

My process for separating non-knowledge from knowledge includes Paths Forward – always keeping options open so that my mistakes can be corrected by anyone who knows something I don't. Most intellectuals don't do this – there's no organized process for sharing important knowledge with them that they don't know. https://rationalessays.com/using-intellectual-processes-to-combat-bias

I think the approach (from the podcast) of *seeking, validating and integrating* knowledge is mistaken/incomplete because it doesn't cover *correcting errors*. Validating means you find out something is valid, which isn't an *ongoing process of looking for and fixing errors* (nor is it *a process of ongoing improvement*, as Eli Goldratt put it in _The Goal_).

Also, instead of "fake knowledge" I would say "mistakes" (or errors), which is different than non-knoweldge (things where you're neutral, you haven't made a judgment).

About experts, a major criterion I use is: Is this expert asking the questions I would ask (and considering the criticisms that I would) if I studied the issue myself? Is he using the methods I would use? Is he aware of the key knowledge I'd use to check for errors in this area? Is he doing the work for me that I would have done (so he can be a good proxy for me) or not? For example, I won't accept expert ideas from non-Objectivists regarding capitalism because they aren't thinking about it in the way I would have. Also I criticized steelmanning recently at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/conversations/messages/27744

> Fortnite is launching on Android, some time after iOS. Three interesting things. First, Epic has decided to bypass the Google Play store and get people to side-load the installation direct from its website: this lets it avoid paying Google commission on in-app purchases, but raises a hurdle to installation - it's betting demand is strong enough, which is probably correct (Apple doesn't allow this on iOS). Second, this also encourages pretty unsafe behavior - there will be a lot of people trying to trick users (and a lot of Fortnite players are children) into downloading malware from look-alike sites (which is a major reason why Apple doesn't allow this, quite apart from the 30% tax). Third, Epic estimates that of the >2.5bn Android phones out there, only 250m are capable of running the game. Link

ugh @ these security problems that are going to hurt kids, and how shitty the android ecosystem and community is.

also i'm curious how are you going to play a fast paced shooter on a phone? this is a game where you aim a gun with your mouse and you fight other human beings, not just handicapped enemies controlled by the computer and designed to be easy enough to beat with bad controls.

>Sometimes," he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, "if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

>> Sometimes," he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, "if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

> Pellegrino: Right now, it is only a platform of governing principles and rough political goals. Our purpose is twofold: First—and if we achieve only this, we’ve achieved a lot—we want to help people to think about politics in a way they haven’t before. In the main, people think of politics as two or more opposing sides clashing in debates over social problems, with the purpose of the debates being to achieve a compromise solution. This compromise is supposed to represent the “moderate” and thus “rational” approach to solving the problem. People familiar with Objectivism know that a compromise can take place only between parties who agree on essentials or ultimate goals. When the parties agree on essential aims, the haggling is merely over details or means of accomplishing those goals.

> This, of course, is the lay of the political landscape right now: Two parties, in essential agreement about the proper functions of government, are haggling over how the government should achieve its ends. They agree that government should control the economy, control people’s lives, and make people and businesses give their “fair share” to society. They disagree only on matters of degree and on the particular means to these ends. They argue over whether individuals should be controlled by the federal or state governments—in the bedroom or the boardroom—in health care or investments. They disagree over how government should redistribute wealth—in the traditional ways, or in newfangled ways. And, agreeing on essentials, they come up with all sorts of ideas and programs for controlling people and redistributing wealth. They never question the premise that this is what government should do. That’s an unchallenged absolute. The only questions are how and to what extent should government interfere and redistribute.

This ignores Trump's promise to drain the swamp, and Cruz's more extreme and specific promises along similar lines like abolishing the IRS and various other government agencies that Cruz specifically named. And I think Trump has actually followed through on repealing 2 laws/regulations for each new 1, or something like that, right?

So it's just not true about everyone agreeing on essentials – unless you're calling Trump and Cruz liars, which would require further elaboration (especially about their actions that *are* in line with their rhetoric). There are prominent Republicans who advocate smaller government and more freedom.

> the nazis were statist, anti-capitalist, anti-liberals and the German socialist workers were voluntary, loyal nazi soldiers.

> the U.S. "conservatives" are the real liberals – in favor of freedom, capitalism, limited government, non-revolutionary reform.

> If you want to get into more detail, then the left/right political spectrum isn't good enough because people's political views are way more complex than just choosing a spot on one (or a few) spectrums.

>>> the U.S. "conservatives" are the real liberals – in favor of freedom, capitalism, limited government, non-revolutionary reform.

>> I can see how that might be the case but you'd have to seperate "conservatives" from "republicans" in order to separate some of the religious right that have very illiberal views. The terms tend to get confusing, I've always considered myself a progressive, and in many ways I probably am, but I think "Classical Liberal" might be closer to my views. But THAT gets confused with libertarian, which I am not.

>> edit: Pinging /u/hossmcdank one of my favorite people when it comes to looking at different ideas without the freak outs.

me:

>> in order to separate some of the religious right that have very illiberal views.

I don't think that's a significant force in US politics today.

> For example, I would consider Ted Cruz to be a prominent, religious, right-wing politician. I don't think he has very illiberal views. And in the 2016 republican primary debates, the other important candidates were less religious and less right wing than Cruz. Do you have in mind some other people (who?) who are more religious than Cruz and significantly different? Or do you have some major objections to Cruz that you think make him illiberal?

> Also, what do you dislike about libertarianism if (as I think you may be implying?) you're in favor of freedom, capitalism, and limited government?

I posted criticism of a paper by Sam Harris and some coauthors related to brain scanning religious and non-religious people. I got a Change My View delta (gold star for changing someone's mind about something) and it gave me a wiki to list them:

> "My grandfather is a 96-yr-old German. When seeing Antifa videos, he shakes his head and says; 'We didn't think it could happen in Germany either. These people (Antifa) act and sound like the NAZI party's Sturmabteilung. Stop them now or you'll regret it.'"

> In short order, Simms' tweet had gotten a Kardashian-level number of retweets, well surpassing CNN's average viewership. (And you wonder why the left is fixated on ending free speech on the Internet.)

> Simms’ grandfather didn’t see any of the antifa videos on TV – the media showed only antiseptic clips carefully washed of any untoward behavior. But videos were all over the Internet. (Again, you see why the left wants to shut down free speech on the internet.)”

Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, by Ludwig von Mises, 1944:

> Actually there have been in these last years all over the world two main political parties: the anti-Fascists, i.e., the friends of Russia (communists, fellow travelers, self-styled liberals and progressives), and the anticommunists, i.e., the friends of Germany (parties of shirts of different colors, not very accurately called “Fascists” by their adversaries). There have been few genuine liberals and democrats in these years.

#10652 Yeah I'd say I am on the left but I am baffled at the hypocrisy when it comes to Antifa. I mean these raving lunatics get a free pass because ??? I have yet to see a reasonable answer on why ANTIFA is treated as anything other than actual violent fascists.

> from the time of the U.S. founding until the dawn of the Progressive Era—which was the advent of statism in America—the government spent 3 percent or less of the GDP. It now spends close to 40 percent and is increasing rapidly with no end in sight.

> We uphold this conviction: Open borders for honest immigrants is an application of the principle of individual rights to those foreign born.

> Consequently, we support open borders for all honest men and women. We maintain that honest individuals have the moral right to choose their country of residence, that the government of a free society must uphold and protect that right, and that, in practical terms, the United States throughout its history has greatly benefited from immigration. Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo), Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), and numerous other geniuses and/or productive giants were and are immigrants to America; Silicon Valley, for example, is heavily populated with expert, foreign-born engineers. Related, labor force participation rates show that low-skilled immigrant laborers are and have long been among American society's hardest workers. To those who argue that immigrants freeload off of the welfare system, our response is dual: Factually, the welfare state is—overwhelmingly—a problem of native-born Americans, not of immigrants, who generally manifest a superlative work ethic; second, the welfare state must be utterly abolished on purely moral and humanitarian grounds regardless of America's immigration policy.

> Eliminating the welfare state will ensure even further that only those willing to work productively will immigrate to America.

> Expensive background checks to ensure the debarring of jihadists, criminals, and persons bearing communicable diseases are, economically, more than offset by immense productivity gained by welcoming such hard-working immigrants.

you should have a serious discussion forum for people to discuss your platform and policies, where you or your representatives/proxies answer questions and criticisms. that way if people have doubts or disagreements, answers are available. and if you're mistaken about any of your ideas, those mistakes can be corrected instead of left unaddressed.

there should be some kind of written, predictable, reliable mechanism for getting questions/doubts/criticisms/suggestions-for-improvements addressed and resolved, and realistically this will involve a discussion forum (so e.g. people can post a question and then you can write a canonical answer – on the forum or elsewhere and link to it) and then other people can come along and read both the question and answer, and can also reply with followup questions.

Hello Fresh - Requires the most preparation on your part (too much in my opinion). Worst packing - bigger box than necessary, stuff moves around and cold packs do not stay in position to keep everything cold. Worst shipping to my location - ships via ground, in transit for days in summer heat?!?!

Gobble - Requires less preparation than Hello Fresh but still significant. 15 minute estimate is way too low. Packing & shipping is fine. Recipes can leave out important steps assuming you know to do them (like cut ends off peppers), and/or ingredients can be unclear (2 unlabeled pouches of sauce-type stuff...what is what?).

Both of the above call for the use of more oil than I'm used to or like, resulting in food being too greasy for my taste if you follow the recipes exactly.

Also both of the above suffer from veggie overload: The tendency to have too high a vegetable to meat ratio, and to use uncooked vegetables (ex: salads, or sides that are uncooked). This is also often combined with icky sauces like vinegar based stuff (hate vinegar). Some people like that kinda stuff but I do not and it disqualifies at least half the meals in each service. Some weeks I can't even find one or two meals where I'd eat most or all of it.

Freshly - Have only had one week from them so far but I really like it! The only prep you do is microwave. They're all pre-cooked. It's kinda like a frozen dinner without the freezing, which permits a little more variety in ingredients than you find in frozen dinners. Each meal is in a standard sized tray so packaging is standard (and tight). Everything stays in position and stays cold. Ships ground to my location BUT it's close, so not a problem. Benefits are that everyone in a family can pick something different with no extra prep, prep overall is extremely short and predictable. And NO VEGGIE OVERLOAD.

I like the content (ingredient usage and ratio) of Freshly's meals the best by far. I like the taste of Hello Fresh the best, but all three are pretty close in terms of taste (comparing stuff I actually like). Which is: significantly better than fast food or frozen dinners, on par with mid-tier restaurants and simple home recipes (but more convenient), and below top end restaurants or specialty home recipes.

#10671 haev you tried TJs meatloaf? it's refrigerated and it's just meatloaf with a little bit of tomato sauce, no sides. very good. you can add your own potatoes, bread, veggies or whatever to go with it.

#10668 - I guess our tastes are different. Mostly they include less of the stuff I don't like. Seeing a bunch of leaves, or avocados, or other random veggies I don't like instantly makes a meal look non-tasty to me.

#10669 & #10670 - OK on the concept, no on the specific TJ's dinner (mushrooms = deal killer). I like lots of TJ's frozen stuff but haven't found any of their refrigerated stuff I like yet. Haven't tried Whole Foods (they're currently inconvenient to my location).

*"According to George Johnson, LaRouche sees history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche's views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. He believes that many of the world's ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. Industry, technology, and classical music should be used to enlighten the world, LaRouche argues, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new dark age in which the world will be ruled by the oligarchs. Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led him to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, and pro-life advocates."*

Equating Aristotle with evil? How can someone come to this errenous conclusion?

- Talking about *access* to real knowledge doesn’t address or acknowledge the issue of *how to resolve disagreements* between ideas.

- In the big picture, the “gap” is always *infinite*. No matter how far you get – 500, 5000, 5 million – there’s always infinity more to go. Potential improvement is unbounded, and finite progress can never get close to or approach the end of an infinite road (on a scale from 0 to infinity, any finite number is always near the beginning). So we must learn to live in a state of ongoing progress (the only alternative is a static life, which is unsustainable – only ongoing progress is sustainable in the long run because new problems are inevitable). See David Deutsch’s book *The Beginning of Infinity*, which is named for this issue (and makes the point about sustainability). http://beginningofinfinity.com

- Keeping in mind positives in an appropriate, objective way – and feeling appropriately positive – is something that one should *automate*. Like most skills, one should put conscious attention into it at first while learning it, and should go through organized the steps and practice it. But after a while it should become second nature and rarely need much conscious attention or reminders, which allows moving on to focus more attention on other things.

He seems to have mixed Plato and Aristotle to a point of disbelief. He seems smart enough to not do this out of a lack of access to text or knowledge about either philospher. I've only read *The Nicomachean Ethics*, but I've often heard that it is possible to misinterpret Plato as pro-science and Aristotle as a hippie. This raises the question, how far is it possible to misinterpret them while (assumingly) still being honest?

> These Screenshots Show How Google Shadowbans Conservative And Pro-Trump Content

Article talks about trying to promote his video, then trying to find out why Google was blocking it. Turns out a Trump quote – that the NYT had published – scrolled along the bottom of the TV interview. jfc. Later he got shadowbanned on YouTube by SPLC censors. Also if you search for Cavuto you only find anti-Trump stuff, even though he makes stuff for both sides:

> Keep in mind, Cavuto is an endangered species. He is one of the last fair and balanced journalists on television. He giveth and he taketh away. But you will have to scroll deep into YouTube to find anything positive about Trump from Cavuto. Google hides those videos.

> You can go 300 videos deep and still not find the interview with me that has the second-most views of any Cavuto video (see above). You will pass videos with 22 views and many that are nine years old. I have been censored out of the Cavuto stream.

Google apparently auto-generates hidden channels based on ppl like Hannity or Tucker, puts whatever videos they want on them by biased algorithm or biased human selection, and then highly prioritizes those videos in search results.

> Even if I type in the exact, complicated title of this particular YouTube video, they offer me something else.

Scary. Read the whole article.

> A recent report claims that a Chicago pastor saw his podcast drop from the top 25 in iTunes to less than 200 only 24 hours after posting a Facebook message “to pray for Donald Trump.”

:(

> One of the sources I interviewed for this article found his business shadow-banned on Facebook after he expressed pro-Trump sentiments. He went through three businesses and thousands of dollars before finally realizing what was happening. He has since changed his online identity, IP address, and bank accounts, and after months of scrubbing he is up and running again. But of course, this time he will keep his mouth shut.

:(

> To prepare for the segment, I quickly googled “media bias.” What came up was a long list of articles telling me that there was no such thing as media bias. A Google-promoted chart ranked CNN somewhere in the middle, between liberal and conservative.

lying scumbags.

> the chart that Google promotes says CBS tacks slightly to the right

jfc

> Even as I research and write this article I’ve been told that Google has now agreed to work with communist censors in China. As long as the Chinese stay on the far left, they should get along fine.

!

---

BTW, me and my FI colleagues have had our own bad experience trying to run twitter ads promoting content that SJWs and Marxists don't like.

Yes. E.g. some people like steak and some dislike it, so having steak in the fridge provides different amounts of well being to them.

Moral truths deal with context. They don't say "Always eat steak regardless of your preferences, allergies or situation." E.g. my understanding of moral truth says, broadly, approximately, to eat foods that you like and which don't harm you (which foods those are depends on the person and their current situation, and there are many other issues like affordability). And the amount to eat depends on your weight, metabolism, how much you ate recently, and other more; morality does not say that everyone should eat 2000 calories a day, it says that "What should a person eat in X situation?" and "What should a person eat in Y situation?" often have different answers.

The answers for what to eat in different situations aren't independent either. Moral knowledge often applies to multiple contexts, but rarely all contexts. There are tips for how to eat that are helpful for many situations. How widely an idea applies is what David Deutsch calls its "reach". Ideas with more reach are less parochial, and are generally more interesting and valuable – but having some knowledge that's very specific to your own situation is good too.

> Yea, and "almost anything" is wildly wrong, as I said. Repeating your claim to try and rationalize what you said doesn't change that what you said is soundly wrong. No, you cannot teach yourself almost anything, not remotely. A person with an average IQ can't do MOST intellectual work, they're not equipped for it, so no, not "almost", in fact it's more like not much.﻿

The stuff LT is talking about has little to do with TCS. It's just her views on how to deal with stuff.

> I am curious on what the perspective of someone who follows the "Take Children Seriously" perspective like @DavidDeutschOxf would think about the YouTube Channel idea. He would certainly be exposed to some mean spirited criticism at best, hateful trolling at worst.

The TCS perspective on this is: it's the kid's choice. Give the best advice you can, to the extent he wants the advice, and let him make his own decision. And then help your kid with whatever his decision is, whether you agree or not. TCS doesn't specifically take a stance on whether it's good or bad to have a YT channel, but is broadly positive about people doing activities in life, and broadly optimistic about the ability of young people to do worthwhile things or acquire skills.

I personally think YT channels are good but that writing is more important than video as a format for serious thinking/learning/discussion. But that isn't a TCS position. TCS is a specific thing that focuses on issues like how to treat your kid and how learning works, not on what to do with one's life.

Also, the concern:

> He would certainly be exposed to some mean spirited criticism at best, hateful trolling at worst.

Is simply not a concern of TCS. TCS does not say to avoid mean spirited criticism or hateful trolling. And if it's implicitly suggesting sheltering his kid from such things due to his young age, then TCS's response to that would be: no. (Though parents are welcome to give wanted, non-pressuring advice about what sort of things to avoid and why. Personally I'd basically disagree and say it's good to learn to take in information, including about how flawed many people are, without being upset, evaluating ideas as if truth were a popularity contest, or thinking that *unargued* insults have any bearing on who you are. I think waiting would only make sense if there was a clear, specific plan in progress, or starting now, to learn some skills that will help the YT channel project succeed better. But I don't think one should just vaguely assume that waiting until one is older will somehow mean one knows how to do things he hasn't been doing.)

> A white woman was hospitalized following an altercation where she called a group of people the N-word on the X2 Metrobus.

> Video emerged on Twitter showing the woman getting into an argument with another passenger. As the white woman begins walking off the bus near 2nd and H streets in Northeast D.C., she calls the other passenger the N-word.

> The video shows the woman exiting the bus before cutting to a clip where she is on the ground, bloodied up.

one of the reaction tweets:

>She tried to call a bus full of niggas, niggers and had the nerve to do it on the X2 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 lord stupidity is a illness

>When it formed six years ago, the founders of the H.L. Mencken Club envisioned a simple forum for the “intellectual right” to be filled with “young thinkers and activists” ready to tackle the tough issues confronting the country. In reality, though, the club was a gathering place for the country’s most prominent white nationalists.

Even SPLC kinda admits that white nationalism isn't the theme and that their issue is that white nationalist speakers are among those who can speak

>Speakers at this year’s conference, which is being held at “a hotel near Baltimore-Washington International Airport,” according to the website, include John Derbyshire, the white nationalist fired from the National Review for writing a piece for a separate publication suggesting that white and Asian parents should warn their children that black people pose a threat to their safety. He plans to give a speech with the puzzlingly bland title, “Politics and Intelligence.”

I laughed at "puzzlingly bland". SPLC wants a better HATE title to put in its fundraising pitches

> A disclaimer: this piece is a poor paraphrase of Deutsch's argument. If it weren't protected by copyright, I would just cut-and-paste the entirety of chapter 7 of TFOR here and leave it at that. I asked Deutsch once to put Chapter 7 on the web as a service to humanity but he declined. I cannot hope to reproduce the clarity and completeness of Deutch's argument (which is really Popper's argument), though I'll certainly give it my best shot.

But he doesn't get epistemology:

> R: That's right, it can't. Science can't *disprove* the existence of *anything*. What science can do is to show, in a philosophically justifiable way, that certain things are *extremely unlikely*.

But just a few lines earlier he'd quoted just one paragraph from DD as fair use, and included a bolded line in it:

> **No valid form of reasoning can logically rule out such possibilities, or even prove them unlikely** [emphasis added]

Then he turns around and says what science can do is show that things are unlikely. :(

> In reading histories of the Third Reich I was always struck by how quickly — in just a matter of months — Germany went from being a free, democratic state to an authoritarian dictatorship, right under everyone’s noses in 1933. I always marveled at how fast and easy it was to destroy freedom. I don’t marvel any more. It is happening to us right now, and most people neither notice nor care. The authoritarian Left is stamping out all dissenting voices. It will soon be even worse: people who don’t hold the accepted opinions will not be able to hold jobs, have bank accounts, buy from various outlets, etc. Think this is hysterical and will never happen here? Watch.

I think Omnipotent Government by Mises explains what happened in Germany better and it wasn't an overnight thing, but still there is tons of cause for concern (and the current US problems have been buildings for decades)

After reading Sam Harris' anti-capitalism, I posted Reisman's new pro-capitalism arguments to the IDW subreddit. It was blocked by the moderator's as off-topic, so I think I'm done with the subreddit. (IDW refers to a list of thinkers, including Harris, Jordan Peterson, and some other people who desperately need the information Reisman offers.)

> We were told that people joined ISIS out of “alienation” or just because they are poor, but when we actually got to interview ISIS members when they were arrested or detained in Iraq and Syria, what media discovered was that these are not poor people suffering discrimination. These are often middle-class and college-educated, sometimes converts to Islamist extremism, who relished the idea of selling slaves and murdering people. They saw traveling to Iraq and Syria to be a kind of vacation where they would get a nice house, emptied of its inhabitants and confiscated from minorities, and they would get slaves and relax.

Disenchantment is a new netflix cartoon from the creator of the Simpsons and Futurama. It's very bad. I watched 3 episodes. The main characters change personalities for the joke of the moment, rather than being consistent. It has lots of jokes about getting drunk and friend zoning guys. It's mean. It's routinely violent. One scene ridicules peace. The main character is a bad person – in her introductory scene they are trying to show her as a *tough* female, but show her *cheating at cards and starting a fight*, and not like a sly criminal, but like someone who thinks she's being cute and doesn't really realize the difference between criminal and non-criminal ways to have fun.

> TWITTER CENSORS DAVID HOROWITZ FOR CALLING OUT ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM

> David Horowitz was censored for tweeting, “But if you're a Muslim, you might not want to be sworn in on a Judeo-Christian bible, since Islam has conducted a 1500 year war against Christians and Jews, is calling for death to Israel and has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Christians recently.”

>My issue is that right wing libertarian philosophy, just like much of existentialism, is based on the presupposition that humans are much more powerful than they are. Modern behavior economics, neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology and genetics completely destroys the foundation of these philosophies, which is that humans can be the authors of their own life in and of themselves

These fields that share the negation of free will, are they the mainstream ideas on human behaviour?

#10736 Yes I think those errors are mainstream. At least mainstream among "intellectuals" and "elites". It's different among deplorable, Christian, Trump voters, who don't have much voice in the media...

> Soros-funded social media censorship plan aims to silence all dissenters from the hard-Left agenda

> The recent wave of censorship of conservative voices on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple mirrors a plan concocted by a coalition of George Soros-funded, progressive groups to take back power in Washington from President Trump’s administration.

> President Donald Trump himself was affected, with his engagement on Facebook dropping by 45 percent.

> A study in June by Gateway Pundit found Facebook had eliminated 93 percent of the traffic of top conservative news outlets.

RIP 93% of conservative news outlet traffic on Facebook. **jesus fucking christ**. this isn't standard, ignorable political bickering. they're out for blood and their schemes are quite far along.

> For example, beliefs don’t cause behaviour. A person chooses behaviour and he may take his beliefs into account when making that choice. Saying the behaviour is caused by belief imports a lower level concept, causation, into a situation where higher level concepts like choices are relevant. In addition, animals don’t have beliefs since they can’t understand explanations but they exhibit behaviours. So some behaviours arise despite the absence of beliefs.

can he or someone else elaborate on this?

I like the anti-reductionist theme and the emphasis on choice, but at some level a person's behaviors must be made in light of their beliefs, no? (I'm nitpicking here in particular with "may take his beliefs into account." Seems more like a MUST to me, like you can't really act without taking beliefs into account).

in choosing to do something, people act according to a belief that their choice will have some chance of bringing about some consequence. like if i choose to make a grilled cheese, i'm acting on the belief that if i place cheese and butter on a sandwich and grill it then i will wind up with a grilled cheese.

even if people have contradictory beliefs on what to do regarding the same issue, their actual behavior reflects some set of their beliefs, doesn't it?

i don't think you can make some strictly reductionistic model and say "Oh with X beliefs you get Y behavior output" or anything like that. but it seems to me like stuff like beliefs, choice, awareness of the world, etc, are all tightly bound up in an ongoing feedback loop.

so for some given situation, you observe it, you have some beliefs about how to behave in it, you act and then maybe modify your beliefs based on feedback.

for thought experiments relevant to actual economics, there is an explanation for both the phenomenon depicted in the thought experiment and why it might get disrupted in real life.

for example, one can talk meaningfully about the tendency of levels of profit in different lines of industry to become similar. because there exist capital markets of people seeking the most return on their dollar, any big profit in one industry relative to another will cause capital to leave the less profitable industries and go towards the more profitable industries. this will enable expanded production in the more profitable industry due to the new capital, which will enable more goods to be made at a lower cost, which will enable prices to be reduced. simultaneously, the withdrawal of capital from the previously less profitable lines of business will lead to a reduction in what can be produced in that line of business.

and while the tendency towards equalization of profit in different lines of industry exists, it's never actually achieved IRL, cuz everything is shifting and changing IRL -- consumer preferences, availability of various forms of capital, technology, availability of talent in a particular field, political interference in the economy, etc, etc. so different lines of industry have different profits in fact.

economics thought experiments purporting to be a guide to what we should do in real life in terms of policy should provide a detailed account of exactly how their hypothetical scenarios relate to the real world and how they deviate.

#10792 I think human action is based on human ideas. I think when Alan said "beliefs don’t cause behaviour" he meant that you still have free will. That means you can e.g. choose not to rob and murder all the business owners even though you have Marxist beliefs and have the power to do it. That is a choice many have made, to their credit – and, as George Reisman says, they should therefore stop calling themselves socialists since they are unwilling to do what is required to take the means of production away from private ownership on a society-wide scale.

>> For example, beliefs don’t cause behaviour. A person chooses behaviour and he may take his beliefs into account when making that choice. Saying the behaviour is caused by belief imports a lower level concept, causation, into a situation where higher level concepts like choices are relevant. In addition, animals don’t have beliefs since they can’t understand explanations but they exhibit behaviours. So some behaviours arise despite the absence of beliefs.

>

> can he or someone else elaborate on this?

>

> I like the anti-reductionist theme and the emphasis on choice, but at some level a person's behaviors must be made in light of their beliefs, no? (I'm nitpicking here in particular with "may take his beliefs into account." Seems more like a MUST to me, like you can't really act without taking beliefs into account).

You can adopt a belief and then choose not to act on it. And if you adopt rational ways of assessing ideas then you can make better choices. So thinking about your actions in terms of choices is better than saying you have to act on some belief, which is true but doesn't help you choose.

> A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.

> For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.

>[...] What can assure me as a human being, and a concerned African american that the ANC will indeed have a fiscal [?] policy that will continue the use of the resources of South Africa in a meaningful way. Or should I put it more succinctly? Will your economy be based on the Marxist system, socialism, or capitalism? Or both?

Nelson Mandela:

>I knew that that was the question that you wanted to ask. I'm happy that you had the courage to put it directly.

>We are not concerned with models, we are not concerned with labels, we are practical men and women whose solutions are dictated by the actual condition existing in our countries. As somebody has said: "we do not care whether the cat is black or white as long as it can catch mice".

>What we want to achieve is a healthy and vibrant economy which can ensure full economy for our people, maximal production and the development of social justice We want it to rectify the imbalances that exists in our economy.

>One of the companies owns more than 75% of the shares quoted at the Johannesburg stock exchange. This is illustrative of how our economy is organized. [...] the resources of the country are monopolized by a white minority. Even in that minority, by a few individuals. Wheres the masses of the people, especially the blacks, are left poor, redeem with diseases, illiteracy, without educational facilities. We want to develop an economy which will put an end to that . And will leave to other people to put a label, if they so wish.

>We are not concerned with models, we are not concerned with labels, we are practical men and women whose solutions are dictated by the actual condition existing in our countries. As somebody has said: "we do not care whether the cat is black or white as long as it can catch mice".

We are only concerned with our ends, never mind the means to achieve it. we are practical, we don't concern ourselves with theoretical concerns like how reality works and what are the proper means to achieve our ends.

> The SPLC can no longer be fairly termed a nonpartisan watchdog group. It has become a hate group itself. Actual political violence is of no interest to it unless it can be deployed in service of the SPLC’s thinly veiled campaign to damage the Right. Bafflement ensued when, in 2012, National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke called up the SPLC to ask whether the outfit was adding Occupy Wall Street to the list of hate groups it tracks after three anarchists linked to the movement were caught plotting to blow up a bridge in Cleveland (all three later pleaded guilty). An SPLC flack explained that his group “only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology.” Since this was exactly what the Occupy fanatics were up to, Cooke was puzzled. “They were anarchists,” the spokesman told Cooke. Yeah. So?

> Well, the spokesman added sheepishly, “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”

I like free speech. I don’t know what the limits should be for like slander or lying.

I dislike how hostile people are towards people who don’t fully agree with the topics that our culture think of as taboo. I think people should be better at explaining those topics and more willing to then they should for non taboo topics, cuz if it’s so clear what is right, then shouldn’t it be easy to explain to people who disagree?

I post like 1 word on the public internet for every 10000 I read probably.

I wonder if the “how many words you wright vs how many you read” ratio is a good thing to keep track of. Anyone have thoughts on how useful that ratio is?

I wonder what Elliot’s thoughts on anime is and if he still watches it, he seems to reference to anime a lot in his older writings, and a bit today still.

I read the “what do you think” and “this is a free speech zone” then wrote what I thought. Was very close to not writing anything at all tho, I’m usually very passive about writing. I think I’m constantly worried about being embarrassed or not knowing enough.

Should I have given this post a title? I don’t think so. I’m not sure when you should give your post a title on the open discussion tho.

I have watched very little anime for over 5 years. I found lots of shows were too similar to things I'd already seen (sometimes in obvious ways, but also sometimes in ways that are hard to explain).

I usually don't title posts. I don't think it's an important feature. I considered removing it. I wouldn't worry about it.

> I think I’m constantly worried about being embarrassed or not knowing enough.

Understandable. People can be very mean about such things. The FI community has some different attitudes, but not entirely, and those can be scary in other ways since people aren't familiar with how to handle them.

> I like free speech. I don’t know what the limits should be for like slander or lying.

A starting point: can you show harm/damages in court?

> I dislike how hostile people are towards people who don’t fully agree with the topics that our culture think of as taboo. I think people should be better at explaining those topics and more willing to then they should for non taboo topics, cuz if it’s so clear what is right, then shouldn’t it be easy to explain to people who disagree?

yes

> I wonder if the “how many words you wright vs how many you read” ratio is a good thing to keep track of. Anyone have thoughts on how useful that ratio is?

I'd suggest between 10:1 in favor of reading and 10:1 in favor of writing. I think tons of people skew too much towards reading, though there are also those who read very little.

but he didn't quote any specific mistakes from my video to reply to (as i *did* video quote things from the video i was criticizing, and respond to them). he wrote 6 paragraphs, some long, but it's all his own summary with no timestamps or quotes, no engaging with any exact thing i said (the most specific thing he mentions, he actually concedes i'm right about). it also tries to deny that BAMN is part of antifa, based on basically "maybe it's not, you didn't prove it was" speculation and no research into BAMN. he also admits that philosophy tube was defending some violence and spends tons of time attacking credentials (i'm a *writer*. i have plenty of writing he could review if he wanted to see and judge my knowledge. i have no idea if the philosophy tube guy writes philosophy or not. surely writing counts more than videos for serious philosophy.)

> And then you hear your wife pull up and the car door slam. She walks in all business, herding your three children in to go upstairs and change out of swimming clothes. You notice: no one is wet, or has been wet.

> “What happened? Is everything all right?”

> “No, it’s not all f**king right. You won’t believe what happened. I’m standing there juggling towels and floaties and the Parks and Rec guys are telling me it’s now $10 a kid for a day swim pass, so I roll my eyes and I’m digging in my purse to get my card out, and then all these little mexican kids go flying through the front door and I’m like ‘Hey, why aren’t you telling them they have to pay’ and the guy is like ‘They have red wristbands” and I say “So?” and he says “it’s a program we have here at the Aquatic Center for disadvantaged youths so they get the benefit of swimming and lessons in a safe environment” and they just kept piling in and I’m thinking we’re already paying through the nose in taxes, and now I have to cough up money for OUR KIDS WHO WERE BORN AND RAISED IN THIS TOWN so these people can swarm the pool for free.”

> You’re hoping she’s done there, but she’s not. You can feel Sunday slipping away. The “boys” can hear everything going on, but you can bet your ass they’re staying out of this one. She continues:

> “And there were so many of them, and they were SCREAMING AND YELLING and it was chaos, and I just, I just, couldn’t do it, so I told the kids we were leaving and I turned around and walked out of there. Then, before we get to the car, James starts crying, says it’s ‘no fair’ and that I promised we’d go swimming today all week, which is true”

> And she’s looking at you, because, you know the deal, you are responsible for fixing this. You think. Or maybe she’s just venting. But you do what you can.

> That night, you get the Sunday Night Blues and Monday morning comes around, and you’re driving into work and you’re looking around your town and you’re thinking:

> This isn’t my town any more. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

> Am I racist? Jesus, am I becoming one of those guys. I sure sound like one of those guys.

i was trying to play a game using Steam in home streaming, with a windows PC as the host and a Mac as the client (cuz my mac's monitor is much much better quality than the windows monitor i currently own)

i was having some trouble with using an xbox one controller. i actually had the controller connected by bluetooth directly to the Windows host. i realized the issue was that even though the PC and mac are pretty close, the bluetooth signal from the controller was not quite making it to the PC with 100% consistency.

it turns out that since the current generation of xbox one controllers support bluetooth and don't need a proprietary receiver with its own driver support, you can just connect an xbox one controller to a Mac directly like any old bluetooth device e.g. https://newatlas.com/how-to-use-xbox-one-controller-mac/47159/

(and then steam does the input mapping for you if you are doing in home streaming like iam)

lefties sometimes point to the fact that a lot of the housing construction that happens in urban areas is luxury housing to say the free market can't solve the "housing crisis."

if some city needs 100,000 units of more housing to satisfy demand but the govt only lets people build 1,000 units, then the developers will of course go for luxury since that's the most profitable give the constraint on the number of units that the government has imposed.

the mass middle of market is where the big profits are but you need BIG NUMBERS to get those big profits. if the govt interferes with the construction of MASS amounts of housing, then of course developers will focus on luxury.

if, to take another example, there was some dumb law that said only 1,000 smartphones a year could be built, apple wouldn't even bother with them -- they'd be novelty toys for rich people made by luxury specialists and cost $10k+ or something like that.

> if, to take another example, there was some dumb law that said only 1,000 smartphones a year could be built, apple wouldn't even bother with them -- they'd be novelty toys for rich people made by luxury specialists and cost $10k+ or something like that.

And, in those circumstances, if Apple did produce 1000 smartphones, all of them would be iPhone X with max storage. Apple would prefer the top end model over the other models.

>Socialism was a proven failure, but Hugo Chávez got his countrymen to try it

>by Daniel Pipes

>Ideas run the world: good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. Sure, money is important, but money is but a means to an end. Ideas are the end. You are not what you eat; you are what you think.

>Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. ... it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

>The story of Venezuela, brought from affluence to misery by its own madman in authority, makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914, the discovery of oil on Venezuelan land brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950, Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland, and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world's fastest growing economy in the 20thcentury. In 2001, Venezuela still ranked as Latin America's wealthiest country.

> Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think.

> Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

> The story of Venezuela makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914 the discovery of oil brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950 Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 20th century. In 2001 Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.

> Venezuela’s troubles, however, had begun long before. Starting around 1958, government interference in the economy, including price and exchange controls, higher taxes, and restrictions on property rights, led to decades of stagnation, with per capita real income declining 0.13% from 1960-97. Still, it remained a normal, functioning country.

> Today the country with the world’s largest oil reserves suffers from a severely contracting economy, runaway inflation, despotism, mass emigration, criminality, disease, hunger and starvation, with circumstances deteriorating daily. Venezuela’s economy contracted by 16% in 2016, 14% last year and a predicted 15% in 2018. Inflation was at 112% in 2015 and 2,800% at the end of last year. Economist Steve Hanke finds an annualized rate of around 65,000% for 2018, making Venezuela’s one of the most severe hyperinflations ever. Food shortages led to an average weight loss among Venezuelans of 18 pounds in 2016 and 24 pounds in 2017.

> Socialism might have been a proven failure globally, but Hugo Chávez convinced Venezuelans to try it. On becoming president in 1999, he stole, dominated, polarized and jailed. Benefiting from about $1 trillion in oil sales during his 14 years as president, he had the means to launch massive social spending programs to secure votes. He could even afford to kill the goose laying golden eggs, replacing competent professionals at the government-owned oil company with agents, stooges and sycophants. In the grandest socialist tradition, his daughter María accumulated a fortune estimated at $4.2 billion in 2015, according to Venezuelan press reports.

> “The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once observed, “is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Chávez pre-empted that problem by seeking treatment for his cancer in Havana, where, Fox News reports, he “was assassinated by Cuban malpractice.” He died in March 2013, about a year before oil prices tumbled, and conveniently bequeathed the disaster that followed to Nicolás Maduro, his still more brutal and incompetent handpicked successor. Once oil revenues shrank, the true costs of Chávez’ bankrupt ideas became clear. Venezuela is now sinking into totalitarianism, using military force to keep socialism afloat.

> Bad ideas have always existed, but they acquired new importance with the advent of liberalism in the late 17th century. Before then, conservatism—respecting tradition while adapting it to new circumstances—had prevailed. An individual king’s or religious leader’s besotted vision could progress only so far before convention rolled it back. Liberalism rendered tradition optional by optimistically deeming each person capable to think through the great issues from first principles on his own.

> Radical theories proliferated, especially during the French Revolution. The floodgates were opened for ideas unmoored from experience and common sense, such as conspiracy theories. These ideas incubated through the 19th century and came to terrible fruition after World War I with fascism, Nazism, socialism and communism. As historian Paul Johnson notes, “The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.”

> The roll call of tyrants who have imposed their own philosophies over the past century is depressingly long, including Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Tojo, Hitler, Ho, Mao, Kim, Nasser, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Assad, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, and Chávez. They fully understood their own game; as Stalin reportedly observed, “Ideas are more powerful than guns.” Each one devastated his fiefdom.

> If bad ideas bring horror, their antidote lies in conservative, modest, tried-and-tested ideas that respect tradition and human nature; not in revolutionary lurches and grandiose experiments, but in incremental improvements on customary practices.

> At a moment when many Democrats are ignoring the lessons of Venezuela and swooning over socialism, it’s back to the barricades in the war of ideas.

#10913 Very few players use control stick to jump. Don't use it. X and Y are both fine, that's mostly a matter of preference. Once you pick a character you could look at some of their tech and see if it's easier with X or Y (like i find it easier to do peach float stuff with Y, where you need to hold jump to float and still hit A during that, but i prefer X in general).

> “Trump reportedly believed that he had and Erdogan struck a deal for Brunson’s release. Erdogan told Trump he would free Brunson if Israel released a Turkish national, Ebru Ozkan, who was detained in Israel pending trial after being arrested for operating a money laundering scheme for Hamas.

> After meeting with Erdogan, on July 14 Trump phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him to free Ozkan. Israel freed Ozkan and sent her back to Turkey the next day.

> So Erdogan ransomed Brunson for a Hamas terrorist. This is not the sort of behavior you would expect to see in a NATO member and a long-term strategic ally.

> But that, of course, wasn’t the worst of it. After securing Ozkan’s release, Erdogan double-crossed Trump. Rather than free Brunson and repatriate him as he promised to do, Erdogan moved Brunson from prison to house arrest and barred him from leaving Turkey. That is, he kept him hostage.

> And now he expects to ransom him a second time, for a bigger fish: Fethullah Gulen.”

Caroline Glick: Andrew Brunson Case Proves U.S.-Turkey Alliance Has Been Over for Years | Breitbart

> On Wednesday, China-based bikeshare company Mobike confirmed that after several months of operations it is leaving D.C. before a city-run pilot program for dockless bikes and scooters ends at the end of August. The company says it is collecting its orange and silver bikes and will refund customers who prepaid for rides.

> Mobike Vice President of North America Operations Chris Martin told WAMU that the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT) 400-vehicle-per-operator limit hindered the company’s growth.

> “We probably should’ve [ended it] even sooner,” Martin told the radio station, without foreclosing the possibility that Mobike could one day return to D.C. if regulations change. He said the pilot program rules were more restrictive than those in other American cities.

> Mobike is the second dockless operator to announce this week that it is quitting the District. On Tuesday, Ofo—which, like Mobike, is based in China—said it could not sustain its operations in D.C. and would instead focus its efforts on a few “viable” markets in the U.S.

>First, U.S. Census data from 2011 to 2015 shows that noncitizens are 7% more likely than the U.S. population to be incarcerated in adult correctional facilities. This alone debunks the common media narrative, but it only scratches the surface of serious criminality by illegal immigrants.

>Second, Department of Justice data reveals that in the decade ending in 2015, the U.S. deported at least 1.5 million noncitizens who were convicted of committing crimes in the U.S. (Table 41). This amounts to 10 times the number of noncitizens in U.S. adult correctional facilities during 2015.

>Third, Department of Justice data shows that convicts released from prison have an average of 3.9 prior convictions, not including convictions that led to their imprisonment (Table 5). This means that people in prison are often repeat offenders—but as shown by the previous fact, masses of convicted criminals have been deported, making it hard for them to reoffend and end up in a U.S. prison.

>In other words, even after deporting 10 times more noncitizens convicted of crimes than are in U.S. prisons and jails, they are still 7% more likely to be incarcerated than the general public. This indicates a level of criminality that is multiplicatively higher than the U.S. population.

>Liberals, in contrast, are *rationalists* because they believe in each person's unlimited capacity to figure things out on his own. Tradition hardly counts: "Rather than arguing from the historical experience of nations, they set out by asserting general axioms that they believe to be true of all human beings, and that they suppose will be accepted by all human beings examining them with their native rational abilities."

>The process currently in place typically begins with a “tribe” or group of individuals who band together to claim vast tracts of private property.

>If these loosely and conveniently conjoined groups know anything, it’s this: South Africa’s adapted, indigenized law allows coveted land, owned and occupied by another, to be obtained with relative ease.

...

> “Since the end of apartheid in 1994, when multi-racial elections were held,” wrote Dan McDougal of the London Times, millions of “acres of productive farmland have been transferred to black ownership. Much of it is now lying fallow, creating no economic benefit for the nation or its new owners.”

...

> Without exception, splendid enterprises that fed the country many times over have been reduced to “subsistence operations with a few mangy cattle and the odd mealie patch.”

> Never, even in my fertile imagination, would I have guessed that we would find a smoking-gun 49-page memo revealing how George Soros operatives, including David Brock, were there at the genesis, the planning stages, with their hands on the ignition key, of the most concerted, well-funded, diabolical attack on free speech in the history of America.

> Fusionism was so called because it was able to construct a narrative that fused together traditionalist Burkean social conservatives and religious Christians, firstly, Cold-War hawks (Cold Warriors), secondly, and free market economic types (including libertarians like Friedman), finally, together.

Think he's ever read anything by Burke? This seems like the equivalent of citing scientific research after only reading the abstracts.

Burke pushed for reform after reform, and advocated freedom. He did value tradition appropriately, which is different than being a traditionalist conservative. He was a member of the liberal whig party, not of the conservative tories. Calling him a *social* conservative is nonsense. He was religious (like basically everyone else at the time) and presumably wasn't a fan of homosexuals like everyone else at the time) but what about his actual speeches, accomplishments and important ideas has to do with today's social conservative ideas like opposing abortion?

> Epic, publisher of Fortnite, decided to launch on Android with a direct download rather than going though Google's app store. Entirely predictably, this came with a security hole. It's worth looking at how this works for how it bears on the broader issues. To get Fortnite, instead of going to the Google Play store, you download an installer app, and that app then downloads the rest of the game, storing it on an external storage card as it does so. But, Android allows any app on your phone complete access to anything on that card, which means that any app on your phone could insert a malicious payload into the Fortnite download as it comes in, and the Epic installer app doesn't check what's happening to the data to stop this. Why would you already have a malicious app? Well, for example, suppose you downloaded a dodgy flashlight app, and didn't give it any permissions. That flashlight app can still intercept the Fortnight download and add its own code, because the Epic installer app uses the storage card, Android lets any app access anything on the card, and the installer app doesn't check. And when your copy of 'Fortnite' asks for permissions - access to your address book, SMS, phone calls etc - you grant them, because this is Fortnite, not some random flashlight app. So. On one hand, this is why you use the app store - you rely on Google to validate this kind of stuff instead of betting on your own ability to harden your installation code. On the other, some of Google's own apps made the same underlying mistake as Epic (not checking what they're reading from the external card), and more importantly, the fact that any app on the phone can arbitrarily change other app's data on the card is a basic hole/feature that Google has included by design. (Finally, for bonus drama, Epic's miss was spotted by Google). Description of the Fortnite hack (link) and description of the the underlying issue (Link).

>Competitive cheerleading is not an official sport that colleges can use to meet gender-equity requirements, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in ordering a Connecticut school to keep its women's volleyball team.

They won't count cheerleading as a sport, even though it is, so that women get more sports than men (one extra one). One consequence is it has worse safety standards and women get hurt.

>Did you know that amongst high school female athletes, cheerleading accounts for 2/3 of catastrophic injuries? Among all sports, cheerleading has the most injuries second only to football. In 2011 alone, 37,000 cheerleaders visited the emergency room.

>In other words, even after deporting 10 times more noncitizens convicted of crimes than are in U.S. prisons and jails, they are still 7% more likely to be incarcerated than the general public. This indicates a level of criminality that is multiplicatively higher than the U.S. population.

so people who are willing to break the law to get into the country in the first place, and break the law to stay here, are willing to break the law in other ways too? and this surprises people?

> Problems with Using the Normal Distribution – and Ways to Improve Quality and Efficiency of Data Analysis

good paper. lots of data doesn't fit the normal distribution. this is often blatant b/c there are negative numbers within 2 standard deviations of the mean, but negative values are impossible.

the paper says the underlying issue is that lots of things in the world have more to do with multiplication than addition, and they suggest using the geometric mean along with basically a standard deviation that you multiply and divide with, instead of adding and subtracting. like if the mean is 10 and the deviation is 2, then 95% of the data is in the range 2.5 to 40.

> in general, laws and processes in science and life are rather of multiplicative than additive nature.

Please let me know if you see any errors in this new post. I got the text from emails and didn't reread it all. There could be a reference to FI or something that doesn't work as a blog post. (I did fix one issue like that).

>> we [9to5Mac] can report with certainty that iPhone XS will be the name, the OLED model will come in two sizes including a larger version, and each will be offered in gold for the first time.

> They also have a photo of a Series 4 Apple Watch, showing off an altogether new watch face that takes advantage of the bigger display and shows at least 8 complications in addition to the time of day.

Stop at stop signs. In general, follow the same traffic rules as cars.

When in doubt, be in the MIDDLE of the lane, and act like you're a car, so that no car tries to share the lane with you (and you don't try to go next to a car, either). This can be good on downhills (going fast) or when there's a bunch of traffic.

Be very careful about passing cars on the right at stoplights. They might want to turn right. This applies even if there's an actual bike lane.

If a street crossing is hard (no stop sign or light for cross traffic) or left turn is hard (there are cars around, especially with multiple lanes so you'd have to merge left into another lane), you can just get off your bike and be a pedestrian.

At 4 way stop signs with lots of traffic, the cars basically take turns (both cross traffic people go, then both people in your direction (towards you and away from you), then both cross traffic). I usually go when a car goes and I'm close enough (don't rush to catch up, just go with the car if you're already up at the front), instead of taking my own turn separately.

If something concerns you (e.g. tricky situation, steep hill up or down, or bad driver) just pull over and stop.

> At 4 way stop signs with lots of traffic, the cars basically take turns (both cross traffic people go, then both people in your direction (towards you and away from you), then both cross traffic). I usually go when a car goes and I'm close enough (don't rush to catch up, just go with the car if you're already up at the front), instead of taking my own turn separately.

Thanks for all your comments. The part above that I quoted was something I found especially interesting / hadn't read elsewhere.

#11027 people are ridiculous. note the bad epistemology. he thinks things need to be positively proven/justified, rather than exposed to criticism. he doesn't care about criticism, just proof/evidence. so he doesn't know a single thing wrong with the essay, just doesn't seem a big pile of cites, and decides to reject it.

also his point about the false dichotomy is wrong. i think the problem is he literally doesn't know what "socialism" is. socialism is government ownership of the means of production. the nazi government were effectively the owners of the means of production because they controlled their use just as an owner would. so that's essentially socialism. the argument here has nothing to do with "it's not capitalism, therefore it must be socialism". Reisman never says that.

note: you cannot use comment limits in permalinks to specific comments that you post anywhere because they will stop working when more comments are added, so the linked comment is no longer within the latest N comments.

Like Facebook, YouTube permalinks don't actually work. But there's only a few comments so you can probably find it. I responded to a hostile comment with:

> So antifa is defensible, but Lauren Southern and Rebel Media are beyond the pale?﻿

Guy is literally defending antifa then tells me that a "balanced discussion" requires not using "far-right" or "anti-left" sources.

He also doesn't understand my honesty in choosing a clear and accurate video title, and thinks I should have lied in the title to hide my actual views – that's the kind of thing he and his lefty social circle do.

Epstein is so second-handed and/or panders to those who are. He asks about how Objectivism helped people accomplish things *that are recognized by other people with high social status*. That's ironic given his association with Objectivism and this question being about the value of Objectivism. He should try following Objectivism more!

> The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (H.R. 2580; Pub.L. 89–236, 79 Stat. 911, enacted June 30, 1968), also known as the Hart–Celler Act, changed the way quotas were allocated by ending the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since t...

> changed the way quotas were allocated by ending the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.

>The proponents of the Hart–Celler Act argued that it would not significantly influence United States culture. President Johnson called the bill "not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions."[17] Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, asserted that the bill would not affect US demographic mix.[2] However, the ethnic composition of immigrants changed following the passage of the law.[18][19] Specifically, the Hart–Celler Act allowed increased numbers of people to migrate to the United States from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

> Prior to 1965, the demographics of immigration stood as mostly Europeans; 68 percent of legal immigrants in the 1950s came from Europe and Canada. However, in the years 1971–1991, immigrants from Hispanic and Latin American countries made 47.9 percent of immigrants (with Mexico accounting for 23.7 percent) and immigrants from Asia 35.2 percent. Not only did it change the ethnic makeup of immigration, but it also greatly increased the number of immigrants—immigration constituted 11 percent of the total U.S. population growth between 1960 and 1970, growing to 33 percent from 1970–80, and to 39 percent from 1980–90.[21]

wikipedia is seriously biased but still admits all this. the same article says:

> The 1965 Act marked a change from past U.S. policy which had discriminated against non-northern Europeans.[2]

There's no way that's what Jeff Bezos wants his managers to do about injuries. He probably considers it just as immoral as most other people reading this news story. And it's bad business. You'll get sued. It'll alienate your better employees. If a culture like that gets established (which this anecdote does *not* demonstrate), it'll be hard to fix it and hire good managers. The guy who doesn't care about injuries is also a bad employee who does other things wrong. Being this degree of hard ass is not how to efficiently deliver stuff.

It makes a big difference whether this is actually Amazon policy, or a bad manager. Hiring good people is hard – it's hard to tell, from an interview, how they'll behave.

> We noticed that you haven't logged into your ESL account within least 4 years and we are writing to inform you that we will unfortunately have to close your account soon. We are forced to do this due to the GDPR policy that prevents us from keeping the user data for more than 4 more years.

leaked video of Google leaders hating Trump and expressing their desire to use their control over information for political activism.

> (00:01:12) Returning to seriousness, Brin says he is “deeply offen[ded]” by the election of Trump, and that the election “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.”

> (00:09:10) Trying to explain the motivations of Trump supporters, Senior VP for Global Affairs, Kent Walker concludes: “fear, not just in the United States, but around the world is fueling concerns, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”

> (00:09:35) Walker goes on to describe the Trump phenomenon as a sign of “tribalism that’s self-destructive [in] the long-term.”

> (00:09:55) Striking an optimistic tone, Walker assures Google employees that despite the election, “history is on our side” and that the “moral arc of history bends towards progress.”

Then he attacks walls.

> (00:13:10) CFO Ruth Porat appears to break down in tears when discussing the election result.

> (00:15:20) Porat promises that Google will “use the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values.”

> (00:20:24) Eileen Noughton, VP of People Operations, promises that Google’s policy team in DC is “all over” the immigration issue and that the company will “keep a close watch on it.”

> (00:23:12) Noughton does acknowledge “diversity of opinion and political persuasion” and notes that she has heard from conservative Google employees who say they “haven’t felt entirely comfortable revealing who [they] are.” and urged “tolerance.” (Several months later, the company would fire James Damore allegedly for disagreeing with progressive narratives.)

> (00:34:40) Brin compares Trump voters to “extremists,” arguing for a correlation between the economic background of Trump supporters and the kinds of voters who back extremist movements. Brin says that “voting is not a rational act” and that not all of Trump’s support can be attributed to “income disparity.” He suggests that Trump voters might have been motivated by boredom rather than legitimate concerns.

> (00:54:33) An employee asks what Google is going to do about “misinformation” and “fake news” shared by “low-information voters.” Pichai responds by stating that “investments in machine learning and AI” are a “big opportunity” to fix the problem.

#11148 He didn't seem aware that paddling is already a thing in lots of US schools. And he was kinda hateful of strict parenting without a word about how the standard other side of that debate is also awful ("permissive parenting" is bad). Basically all normal ways of parenting are awful and then everyone complains about how some other school of parenting is awful while being oblivious to what's wrong with their own favored approach. And he thinks he knows more about the psychology of people he hates than he actually does.

#11161 In the first 30 seconds, he says right wingers as a group "invariably" make certain arguments (which are not even close to my main points on the subject), accuses them of calling people "cucks" (which I don't do), and says he'll look at data (rather than think about economic logic).

I don't think that's the most charitable interpretation of this. It could well come close to straw-manning what is intended with this.

It is not about popularity or even authority.

The whole goal is to keep us from fooling ourselves, as we are the easiest people to fool.

These methods have been developed through the years as a way to defend against bias, and keep us form error correcting.

It is certainly not a blatant attack on thinking. I also think that the power of expert opinion goes only as far as their ability to explain their theories or positions. How do we differentiate the distrust of someone because they are fallible and a system that makes it less likely to fall prey to cognitive biases?

I may not have a full grasp of that side or yours but I do not think you presented it in a way that is in accord with the principle of charity.

> I may not have a full grasp of that side or yours but I do not think you presented it in a way that is in accord with the principle of charity.

The principle of charity is commonly used to attack and pressure people – like you've just done – in ways that do not related to the actual issues at stake. It's a way to attack without refuting a word of the argument.

From your position of total ignorance of the issues, how can you say whether curi's evaluation is fair? I think he's exactly right and it's very important and he's doing the world a favor by understanding this and sharing information about it with anyone who will listen – he's contributing to problem solving. You are trying to suppress his outlier ideas with social pressure by accusing him of being uncharitable while not trying to pursue the actual issues.

You seem to be under the impression that authoritarians don't exist – or at least not among groups that say they aren't authoritarian. Or something. Maybe it's because you're confusing epistemological authoritarians with political authoritarians. But most academics are political authoritarians too, so that wouldn't even be a bad bet.

> I don't think that's the most charitable interpretation of this. It could well come close to straw-manning what is intended with this.

>

> It is not about popularity or even authority.

RCTs are put above cohort studies. But if a cohort study contradicts an RCT then it's possible that the RCT is wrong because it was conducted badly. So what's relevant is whether there is a criticism of the study, not what kind of study it is. So this diagram is about assigning authority not about how to make judgements rationally.

> These methods have been developed through the years as a way to defend against bias, and keep us form error correcting.

These methods are tools. People have to judge when and how to use a given tool and they can make bad decisions. So ranking the tools doesn't make sense.

> It is certainly not a blatant attack on thinking.

The diagram is an attack on thinking since it ranks studies by their methods rather than considering whether a person has an unanswered criticism of the study.

> I also think that the power of expert opinion goes only as far as their ability to explain their theories or positions.

This is also true or non-expert opinion, and all the kinds of studies in that diagram.

>So what's relevant is whether there is a criticism of the study, not what kind of study it is. So this diagram is about assigning authority not about how to make judgements rationally.

Suppose treatment A has been investigated in a case study (someone took treatment A, they were watched over a period of time, and then their disease improved). Suppose treatment B has been investigated in a RCT involving 4000 people. It also showed improvement of the disease.

I don't have any criticisms of how the studies themselves were performed. For being a case study, it was performed properly. For being a RCT, it was performed properly.

I have the disease in question. I'm considering treatment A vs B. Should I criticize *the idea of me going with treatment A* on the grounds that the only evidence that it actually works in reality is a single case study? Is that an invalid criticism?

To clarify, I'm not criticizing treatment A itself. It could still be good. But I'm criticizing me going with it right now because it has given much of a demonstration on how it'll actually work in reality (yet).

>To clarify, I'm not criticizing treatment A itself. It could still be good. But I'm criticizing me going with it right now because it has given much of a demonstration on how it'll actually work in reality (yet).

[...] because it *hasn't* given much of a demonstration on how it'll actually work in reality (yet).

Kate, you seem to be asking about whether there's any difference btwn the things in the pyramid, or if CR views them as identical. Yes there are differences. They are, literally, different. These differences may be mentioned in arguments when people find ways they are relevant.

>> I may not have a full grasp of that side or yours but I do not think you presented it in a way that is in accord with the principle of charity.

> The principle of charity is commonly used to attack and pressure people – like you've just done – in ways that do not related to the actual issues at stake. It's a way to attack without refuting a word of the argument.

Perhaps that pressure is necessary. I have not much refuted an argument if I am refuting a strawman. When people criticize Popper but aren't actually attacking the positions he *actually* held you're right to dismiss that criticism would you not agree?

> From your position of total ignorance of the issues, how can you say whether curi's evaluation is fair? I think he's exactly right and it's very important and he's doing the world a favor by understanding this and sharing information about it with anyone who will listen – he's contributing to problem solving. You are trying to suppress his outlier ideas with social pressure by accusing him of being uncharitable while not trying to pursue the actual issues.

Total ignorance is a bit of a stretch. I've done enough research to distinguish what I would consider weak and strong studies. However, I don't have to be an expert in research design to know that the goal is not authoritarian control but an attempt to improve error correction.

#11181 You're advocating psychological pressure (as against rational arguments), calling curi mistaken without argument (a bit of a stretch is a claim about an error without giving reasoning), mistaken about strength and weakness (see https://yesornophilosophy.com ) and you aren't trying to learn what curi's (and DD's and Popper's and my) thinking about epistemological authority is. curi knows what these ppl's philosophy is and thinks it's false and he knows why, in full detail (as do i). and once you know what it is, well, all forms of justificationism involve the use of authority b/c authority is fundamentally the thing which provides justification. there's nothing else to provide justification but authority. it always turns out to be authority when you investigate from a Popperian perspective.

> Total ignorance is a bit of a stretch. I've done enough research to distinguish what I would consider weak and strong studies. However, I don't have to be an expert in research design to know that the goal is not authoritarian control but an attempt to improve error correction.

wait are sentences 2 and 3 there actually supposed to be relevant to sentence 1? are they supposed to be arguments for non-ignorance? but the main relevant thing is ignorance *of Critical Rationalism* and those don't even claim to know the first thing about CR, and actually both sentences contradict CR (with no sign the author knows that he's contradicting CR).

i initially read it as disconnected hostility, but it could actually be intended to be connected. regardless, sentence 3 is certainly disconnected from the issues – the discussion was about the pyramid and the philosophy behind it, not about the goals of research design. (also he doesn't say authoritarian control *of what*, so that's vague). also the claims about attempting to improve error correction are, well let's just say citation needed. that is not a standard thing for most ppl to say is their goal. he seems to be transplanting a bit of CR and attributed it to non-CR ppl b/c, while they didn't actually say it, they seem reasonable so they must mean it!?

>Different metrics of evidence quality are used for different purposes. (Though such things are overrated and often no such metric is needed.)

Is there a useful metric (and ranking) of evidence quality associated with the hierarchy of evidence? Is there some salvageable value there? Or is it useless?

> Kate, you don't know what you're talking about and are overreaching. You are not taking appropriate steps to learn this subject, nor are you even making clear what your conversational goal is.

I use the hierarchy of evidence (which vaguely in my mind ranks study designs based on their quality of experimental evidence) as a factor when comparing different medical treatment options to go with. e.g. see #11176.

One of my conversational goals is to understand whether I'm making a mistake.

> One of my conversational goals is to understand whether I'm making a mistake.

Yes you're making lots of mistakes due to epistemological ignorance. You yourself say "vaguely". You shouldn't rank drugs by the types of studies that failed to refute them.

If you want to rank drugs better, consider which ones have better *causal explanations* regarding how they work, and which just have selective attention on correlations. The role of empirical research should be primarily for inspiration and criticism; it can't directly tell you answers about what works or why. Drugs which haven't yet been exposed to much analysis or criticism can be seen as untested/unproven, which is a different kind of thing than trying to estimate if they work or not and which is only a secondary issue, not the main issue (the main issue being whether there's knowledge about it working).

> You shouldn't rank drugs by the types of studies that failed to refute them.

Is there some usefulness in ranking study designs, though? I’m trying to figure out exactly what should be ranked, if anything at all. More on this below.

> If you want to rank drugs better, consider which ones have better *causal explanations* regarding how they work, and which just have selective attention on correlations.

ok

> The role of empirical research should be primarily for inspiration and criticism; it can't directly tell you answers about what works or why. Drugs which haven't yet been exposed to much analysis or criticism can be seen as untested/unproven,

Oh, maybe this is what can be usefully ranked? Can study designs be usefully ranked according to the extent to which they expose drugs to criticism involving empirical testing and/or further analysis (e.g. a meta-analysis of RCTs)? I like this better than my vague idea that study designs are ranked based on the quality of evidence they provide.

For example, some guy’s idea that hasn’t been tried out on anyone yet regarding the efficacy of a drug (this would actually be considered “no study”) < a case study examining the efficacy of the drug in a single person who took it < a RCT examining the efficacy of the drug in 4000 people who took it.

Each level of study design rank *only* conveys that there’s been further exposure to criticism involving empirical testing and/or further analysis.

Each level of study design rank does not directly tell us answers about which drugs are better. We find out that some drugs are better when other drugs get criticized for not being as efficacious (or for causing intolerable side effects, for having explanations that focus on correlations and not causality, or for something else). Is what I’m saying compatible with CR?

> which is a different kind of thing than trying to estimate if they work or not and which is only a secondary issue, not the main issue (the main issue being whether there's knowledge about it working).

Continuing with my current guess:

So, it’s important not to look at drugs that so far have only been studied in e.g. “low-rank” (my terminology from above) case studies and try to estimate whether or not the drugs will work. A low level of exposure to criticism involving empirical testing doesn’t necessarily mean a drug is ineffective. Just like a low level of exposure to criticism doesn’t necessarily mean an idea is mistaken.

But the thing to do is to provide that needed criticism for drugs in the form of argument (e.g. a lack of causal explanation) and/or substantial empirical testing (e.g. a RCT that better uncovers a lack of efficacy or intolerable side effects). Is this close?

> Is there some usefulness in ranking study designs, though? I’m trying to figure out exactly what should be ranked, if anything at all. More on this below.

This is backwards. You should start with a problem and seek solutions, not take a potential solution and go look for problems to use it on.

@testing, there are many different types so a single ranking of amount of testing is rly hard and again u should start with the problem first and then try to devise some kinda ranking (or non-ranking) that will help with that problem, don't start with the ranking. but a reasonably generically useful thing to consider is: did a bunch of ppl take this drug and nothing awful appeared to happen? that's different than few/no ppl tried it yet. and it can matter if ppl have tried taking it long term already, or just short term.

Ok. I see your point about coming at it backwards. And right now, I can't think of a problem that the ranking solves. You can just use general criticisms when comparing treatment options.

Criticisms such as:

- so far this drug has only been tried out in a few/no other people (compared to this other drug that thousands of ppl took)

- this drug lacks a causal explanation that makes sense

- the study examining this drug has major problems with bias

- etc.

I'm thinking that any good, pro-criticism, error-correcting ideas that are somewhat reflected by the hierarchy of evidence (e.g. ideas about needing to expose drugs to rigorous, empirical testing and ideas about wanting to reduce bias) can just be incorporated into the process as general criticisms.

sounds like a bullshit excuse to let bad science that agrees with you pass through and ignore the good science that disagrees with you. That's how you get climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.

> Schiller: We’re like, “Steve! Newton customers are picketing! What do you want to do? They’re angry.” And Steve said, “They have every right to be angry. They love Newton. It’s a great product, and we have to kill it, and that’s not fun, so we have to get them coffee and doughnuts and send it down to them and tell them we love them and we’re sorry and we support them.”

> Cook: It was an awful time. The stock crashed, it goes down by 60 to 70 percent. We get a call from Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway. He wants to talk about acquiring Apple. Steve and I went to a meeting with Waitt and their CEO, and it’s a different Steve. Very calm, listening to the comments they made, how they’d probably keep the Apple brand. I was sitting there feeling like my organs were being cut out. Then they said maybe they could come up with a role for Steve, and I’m thinking—he’s going to blow! He’s going to blow any minute! Then they start talking about price. And Steve looks at them—he could look at you with eyes that just penetrated your soul—and says, “Who do you think is worth more, Apple or Gateway?” The meeting lasted only two or three minutes more. And in a few weeks they had some accounting scandal, and their stock crashed.

> Scott Forstall (SVP of software, 1997–2012): Those buildings were mazes. Every time I would bring someone on campus, they would get lost. There’s only one time I remember someone not getting lost, and it was when we were working on a screen reader for sight-challenged people. I brought someone in who needed a seeing-eye dog. He asked to use the restroom. Every other time this happened, I would wait because they would get lost trying to find their way back. Left, right, left, right, right. Five minutes later his dog brings him right back into the room. That seeing-eye dog was the only one who knew his way around the very first time.

> Forstall: Whenever I ate with Steve, he insisted on paying for me, which I thought was a little odd. Even if we went in together and he selected something quick like premade sushi, and I ordered a pizza in the wood-burning pizza oven, he would wait for me at the cash register for 10, 15 minutes. I felt so awkward. Finally, I told him. “Seriously, I can pay for myself, so please don't stand there and wait for me.” He said, “Scott, you don't understand. You know how we pay by swiping your badge and then it’s deducted from your salary? I only get paid a dollar year! Every time I swipe we get a free meal!” Here was this multibillionaire putting one over on the company he founded, a few dollars at a time.

> Why do people have music running through their heads? Is there anything we can do to get it to stop?

Are there people who don't have music running through their heads most of the time? If so, what's the difference between them and the people who do?

Maybe it could be good to have music running through your head if it's good music. Anyone have suggestions for good music that might inspire someone to be a better person?

I thought about trying to add words to the music running through my head, which doesn't usually have words. The words could be things I want to tell myself over and over. I had trouble coming up with words.

i don't have music running thru my head most of the time. almost never.

sometimes i have music running thru my head, like right after hearing a song.

i only listen to music while driving or working out. often i like it silent while driving or working out (like because i'm deep in thought and I don't want music to get in the way, though often i'm deep in thought and the music is on but I don't really notice the music - same for watching tv/movies).

Overwatch content creator (YouTuber) mykl got a bunch of complaints after sharing a *rumor* on Twitter which was partially incorrect. He's recently leaked some inside info correctly, which he labelled differently (as coming from his "sources").

the complaints included that he needed to ask ppl for comment b4 saying things about them. mykl decided he'd made a mistake and wrote thoughts:

>> Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right has been left shocked and furious after a court ordered her to be examined by a psychiatrist to determine if she “is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions”.

>> The unusual summoning is in relation to Le Pen having tweeted out gruesome propaganda images from terror group Isis that showed the bodies of people having been executed by the so-called Islamic State.

>> “I thought I had been through it all: well, no! For denouncing the horrors of Daesh (Isis) by tweets the “justice system” has referred me for a psychiatric assessment. How far will they go?!” she said on Thursday.

>> “I am being charged for having condemned the horrors of Daesh,” Le Pen told AFP.

>> “In other countries this would have earned me a medal.”

>> The crime is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros ($91,000).

#11225 Yeah, that was a couple days after he got triggered because I and others don't hate the idea of Trump building a wall. I told him he was triggered, and some other warnings, and asked some questions, and he just ignored me and kept ranting for like an hour. Amazingly, he also made an excuse that he was too busy to talk properly (which doesn't seem to explain writing so many nasty comments). He apologized, by email, for raging that time:

> Hello Elliot,

> I apologize for my behavior yesterday. I shouldn't have implied you were a bigot. I've been thinking of what caused me to react so strongly and I think it was fear. I was afraid that you could convince me to think that a wall is a good idea. It felt like I was betraying my friends and people I care about if I were to start agreeing with something like that. But I ended up betraying my own values of seeking truth and honest conversations. Either way, I behaved poorly and I apologize.

> -Andy

But then he raged again, similarly, a few days later... (The quotes in #11225 regarding subreddit moderation, then leaving further discussion, apparently permanently.)

Notice the irrationality of being scared of being convinced that an idea is true. And notice the personal bias, which he brought up in the conversation too – he knows some immigrants and that, not principles, is how he decides on political policies. (I don't think he ever answered if they were *illegal* immigrants, which is the only type of immigrant that a wall would be targeted at. Many legal immigrants support Trump!)

Anyway, as is common with apologies, he didn't learn his lesson or change anything.

Andy is a moderator of https://www.reddit.com/r/IntellectualDarkWeb/ where his name is kodheaven (blog: https://heuristicworld.blogspot.com ). I pointed out some ways their rules were unclear but Andy said he thought they were fine and didn't respond to the specific problems I had pointed out – and then raged, called me a bully, left, etc. It's really sad how much people's parents and teachers destroy their minds, and they usually never get over it.

He was friendly at first and I helped him learn the basics of minimum wage, but then he became hostile quite fast. Or at least it seemed like an abrupt change to me. Based on the quotes in #11225 , I guess he was building up resentments and problems for a while and dishonestly hiding them. I had noticed that *he brought up a lot more topics than he made progress on*. I'd tried to get him to stop and focus more, and had a lot of success with minimum wage, and some success with a few other things (e.g. altruism), but it was hard because he was resistant to productive discussion methods. He also never took any interest in the He also did sabotaging things like reading most of Atlas Shrugged *while largely disliking it or not getting the point* – without telling us he was reading it (I wouldn't have even recommended it to him, since I wouldn't have expected him to understand it) and, although he formed a negative judgment, he never discussed a single issue he had with the book.

Obviously, there's another issue of genetic jewishness, but I don't subscribe to that. I think that's just a way to bootstrap bottled rage by people who are antisemites for no good reason. Epigenetics and environmental factors play a much more important role than supposed trait descent.

and you didn't specify any particular claims you think are good and important from the article. this is a problem because the article doesn't read as an organized argument and it's hard to find the main points (and there's a major concern that if I found what I think are the main points, they wouldn't be the ones you had in mind).

> In research compiled by Bloomberg, the 64GB iPhone XS cost Apple $23.68 for the NAND storage specifically, the 256GB cost $66.24, and the 512GB cost $132.48. In terms of revenue, the 512GB storage option is estimated to make Apple $241 more per iPhone than the 64GB tier, an increase from $107 between the highest and lowest storage tiers in last year's iPhone X.

Neat to know things about business margins. (Be aware that these estimates are usually not super accurate.)

> The researchers also found that if User A, whom we’ll call Anna, shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for User B, whom we’ll call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using that phone number, which I call “shadow contact information,” about a month later. Ben can’t access his shadow contact information, because that would violate Anna’s privacy, according to Facebook, so he can’t see it or delete it, and he can’t keep advertisers from using it either.

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the num- ber of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches.

>“Ten years ago, the $999 price of iPhone X would not have bought a state of the art camera, a pocketable computer, a personal audio player, portable TV and a cellular phone, let alone paid for any of the new key features of iPhone X. Add in inflation and last year's iPhone X price tag would barely have bought the original iPhone and used iPod in 2007, or not quite an entry-level Mac in 2000.”

Apple and the aggressive rollout of its iPhone XS vision for the future

>ON FRIDAY, FACEBOOK revealed that it had suffered a security breach that impacted at least 50 million of its users, and possibly as many as 90 million. What it failed to mention initially, but revealed in a followup call Friday afternoon, is that the flaw affects more than just Facebook. If your account was impacted it means that a hacker could have accessed any account that you log into using Facebook.

> The Communistic scheme, instead of being peculiarly open to the objection drawn from danger of over-population, has the recommendation of tending in an especial degree to the prevention of that evil.

> “Our paper-writing methodology always followed a specific pattern: it started with an idea that spoke to our epistemological or ethical concerns with the field and then sought to bend the existing scholarship to support it. The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field. Therefore, each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or conclude. We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the academic canon.

> This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up.

> This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.”

> “At other times, we scoured the existing grievance studies literature to see where it was already going awry and then tried to magnify those problems. Feminist glaciology? Okay, we’ll copy it and write a feminist astronomy paper that argues feminist and queer astrology should be considered part of the science of astronomy, which we’ll brand as intrinsically sexist. Reviewers were very enthusiastic about that idea. Using a method like thematic analysis to spin favored interpretations of data? Fine, we wrote a paper about trans people in the workplace that does just that. Men use “male preserves” to enact dying “macho” masculinities discourses in a way society at large won’t accept? No problem. We published a paper best summarized as, “A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists.” “Defamiliarizing,” common experiences, pretending to be mystified by them and then looking for social constructions to explain them? Sure, our “Dildos” paper did that to answer the questions, “Why don’t straight men tend to masturbate via anal penetration, and what might happen if they did?” Hint: according to our paper in Sexuality and Culture, a leading sexualities journal, they will be less transphobic and more feminist as a result.

> We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

> Put another way, we now have good reasons to believe that if we just appropriate the existing literature in the right ways—and there always seems to be a citation or vein of literature that makes it possible—we can say almost any politically fashionable thing we want. The underlying questions in every single case were the same: What do we need to write, and what do we need to cite (all of our citations are real, by the way) to get this academic madness published as high “scholarship”?”

Meant to set the voat.co title to the title here. It's: "UBISOFT leaks: company mandates diversity training for white employees, HR drones brag about hiring based on skin color! Anti-white propaganda to be implemented in all games"

> On campus, all can present equally valid narratives. What privileges one story over another is not necessarily any semblance to reality, at least as established by evidence and facts. Instead, powerful victimizers supposedly “construct” truths based on their own self-interests. As a result, self-described victims of historical biases are under no obligation to play by what they consider to be rigged rules of facts, evidence, or testimony.

> This dynamic explains why Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J) insisted that Dr. Ford told “her truth.” In other words, evidence was not so relevant. Ford’s story of events from 36 years ago inherently would have as much claim on reality as Kavanaugh’s rebuttal — and perhaps more so, given their different genders and asymmetrical access to power.

> There was little interest in discovering the ancient idea of “the Truth.” To do that would have required the messy work of taxing the memories of teenage behavior nearly four decades prior.

> Truth-finding would have required difficult, time-honored examinations of physical evidence, the testimony of witnesses, and even unpleasant cross-examinations about the time and place of the allegations. Feelings might have been hurt. Motives might have been questioned, as they are under constitutional norms of due process.

> “There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.

> One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”

> But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

> One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.”

> As part of the review, AnandTech also offered a look at how Apple has improved performance in older devices by tweaking scaling performance. The A9 in the iPhone 6s, for example, took 435ms for the CPU to reach maximum frequency, but that time was cut to 80ms in iOS 12 for a "great boost to performance in shorter interactive workloads."

> “Kavanaugh, for the first time, used language in his testimony to make it implicitly clear to the people whose support he needed—people who would pressure wavering senators—that he was being assaulted by the very forces Republicans and conservatives had been fighting against for the better part of 40 years. He called them out by name and thanked President Trump for his support. This was a breach of judicial etiquette, but you cannot ask a man to allow himself to be ruined to preserve a set of behaviors that have already been rendered passe by the deployment of charges of sexual assault and gang rape. I mean, you can ask, but only a fool would take you up on it.”

#11281 Disorganized. Condescending ranting that doesn't really attempt rigor or seriousness. More interested in social dynamics and DHVs than changing the world or educating anyone or clarity. Knows less than he pretends to. Not a philosopher. Lacks principles to organize the ideas. Lots of parochial details. Does a bad job of engaging with existing good ideas. Kinda mean. Putting on a show that complains about other people putting on shows. No paths forward.

> “Another Republican president might have lost his nerve amid all this. More than one elite conservative pundit called on Trump to ditch Kavanaugh and appoint Amy Coney Barrett instead. She was a woman, you see, so she’d be immune to criticism. Except, of course, she wouldn’t have been: the very appearance of anti-abortion commitment that made her appealing to many elite Christian conservatives would have made her unacceptable to Susan Collins, the pivotal Republican vote in the Senate. And if Barrett wasn’t vulnerable to sexual allegations, something else would have had to serve. Plagiarism, maybe? Finances? Did she ever meet a Russian?

> More to the point, abandoning Kavanaugh would have been a sign of weakness, demoralising to the Republican base — which firmly stood by Kavanaugh — and an intoxicating taste of blood to liberals, who would know that if they could win this first fight, the next round would be worth fighting too. Instead, by seeing Kavanaugh through to confirmation, Trump has showed Republicans that they can win so long as they don’t pre-emptively surrender. His own campaign in 2016 had been fought on the same premise. Republicans had been in a habit of apologising for themselves since at least the time George W. Bush ran on ‘compassionate conservatism’ — what exactly was he implying about everyone else’s conservatism? — in 2000, when he became president only by grace of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court. (Which is fair enough: the 2000 election genuinely was a virtual tie in the decisive state of Florida.) Mitt Romney cringed when he was called out for ‘self-deportation’ and ‘binders full of women,’ even though the former was a humane and effective immigration policy (one much in evidence during the Obama administration, in fact) and the latter was a ill-phrased but sincere promise to include many women in his administration.

> But that was another problem with the ‘draft Barrett’ idea: although the conservative writers pushing it liked her for her presumed views on abortion and thought of themselves as being clever political strategists for suggesting a woman, in fact they were playing to the very style of politics that the centre-left dominates — that is, they were conceding the narrative that Republicans are bad for women and only a woman could negate the GOP’s justly-acquired bad reputation among women. This didn’t work when John McCain put Sarah Palin on his presidential ticket. It wouldn’t have worked for Amy Coney Barrett, either — though she may indeed make a fine justice one day. Just as the politics of ‘compassion’ doesn’t work for conservatives (as opposed to the politics of jobs and American industry), the politics of ‘see, we can too find women who like us!’ concedes everything to conservatism’s enemies. It doth protest too much.”

BTW I put links to the source videos in the description, in case people either wanted more context or wanted to use them for their own vids or whatever. I plan on doing that from now on since it's very little work to do so and adds some real value to the end result.

> 1.6 million views. I thought Avatar The Last Airbender was amazing, but Korra was only OK (not garbage, though!). The video description begins:

>> Reuploaded due to salty Legend of Korra fans mass-flagging the previous video and having it locked to private.

> What the fuck, it's not just political stuff being censored, it's just the mob causing problems with sharing any ideas that offend a large group.

Korra is an LGBT heroine now so she's political. Everything is political. Even Taylor Swift (formerly the Switzerland of celebrities when it came to being neutral on politics) is now doing left-wing advocacy

Leftists say their policies will make everyone better off overall. But then why can’t they persuade people to participate voluntarily? They don’t really do persuasion. The leftists will say stuff like that’s impractical, there’s a collective action problem, etc etc. But I think the basic issue is leftists think that non-leftists are too dumb to see the brilliant genius of left-wing policies and need to be forced for their own good by the state.

That’s how they act, anyways. They’re mostly not focused on creating like great viral content to persuade everyone about how harmful plastic bags are or something like that. There is some of that type of thing, but I think that’s mostly geared towards activating their “base” for political action (and some I guess might be geared towards indoctrinating captive audiences in the schools). Overall, they focus on political power a lot more than anything like persuasion.

Long, interesting story about how awful working at Google+ was. Office politics and crap.

Notably, they had to bribe other parts of the company to do G+ integration by paying them lots of extra money, as bonuses. Cuz people didn't want to do G+ integration in other products. I think it's interesting that Google employees aren't just like slaves to be ordered around – Google found it easier to just pay them a ton of extra money to get them to do something dumb rather than just saying "yo I'm the boss, do this".

> Bustamante said that Warren’s test results show the “vast majority” of her ancestry is European, but that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor,” likely 6–10 generations ago.

how did she know she's *cherokee* in particular if she had one indian relative 200 years ago, and has no idea what their name was, their gender, who they were, where they lived, what tribe they were in, etc?

> The Cherokee Nation in a statement said using a DNA test to claim connection with a tribal nation is “inappropriate” and “wrong.”

> “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” said Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. “It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”

> Hoskin accused Warren of “undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

> He argued that DNA tests fail to distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America and noted that tribes set their own legal requirements for citizenship.

> Warren claims to have Cherokee blood. The Cherokee Nation requires a person to have at least one ancestor listed on a federal census used to allot Cherokee land in the early 1900s known as the Dawes Final Rolls.

> Unlike other tribes, the Cherokee Nation does not require a minimum blood quantum for citizenship.

> If Elizabeth Warren had been Jewish in Nazi Germany, her 1/64th, ancestry, let alone 1/1024th, would have been considered too small to keep her out of the Nazi Party or the SS. That’s how insignificant the worst racists consider it. She’s gotten a lot of mileage out of nothing.

i reloaded a page where 3 separate big ads had appeared just at the top, and they were all gone. adblock sucks. i think i also semi-recently tried adblock plus (which is different but similar) with similar results.

if i have trouble with ublock, i will get 1blocker which is supposed to be great except that it doesn't block ads within youtube videos. i have 1blocker on ios and have had good experiences with it, and i read some reviews recommending it on both mac and ios. 1blocker costs a small amount of money which is perhaps why it's superior.

> “Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

> In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

> Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood.

> Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

> The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.”

> “Almost every old farmstead in my vicinity is no longer just a home for a single farm family. They are often now surrounded by trailers and lean-tos, in turn sub-rented out to dozens of others—violations of zoning laws and building codes of the sort that would earn me a stiff fine, but which are of little interest to local authorities. Of three neighboring farmsteads down the road, one is now a storage area for dozens of used porta potties and wrecked cars. Another is an illegal dumping ground. The third has been raided on various occasions by authorities in order to stop drug dealing, gang activity, and prostitution.

> Our rural environs are often home to hard-working immigrants, but also to various Mexican gangs, drug dealers, and parolees. I hesitate to offer too many details because in the past I have incurred the anger of dangerous neighbors who got wind of filtered down stories of their criminality. It is enough said that sirens, SWAT teams, and ICE raids are not uncommon.

> A month ago a gang member shot up a neighbor’s house. He was arrested, released, and rearrested in a single night after trying twice to break into the home. The armed homeowner stopped his entry. I know of no nearby resident who is not armed. I cannot remember anything remotely similar occurring before 1980. In the 1970s we had no keys to our doors, and houses were permanently unlocked.

> Some of those with criminal records and gang affiliations were born in the United States. Perhaps America often does not seem as much a promised land to the second generation as it did to their parents, who arrived destitute from impoverished Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Central America. Arriving from one of the poorest regions in the world to one of the wealthiest and most culturally different— without the competitive requisites of English, legality, and a high-school diploma—in an era when the salad bowl is preferable to the melting pot, can easily result in the frequent chaos described below.

> I object most to the environmental damage in our rural areas. By that I mean the tossing of household waste or even toxic chemicals onto farmland. Staged cock- and dog-fighting is also not uncommon. I have found a few carcasses ripped to shreds, some with ropes around the dead dogs’ neck.

> Picking up tossed junk in my orchard is a routine experience. The perpetrators often leave plastic bags of their bulk mail (with incriminating addresses!) among soiled diapers and wet garbage. Local authorities have enough to do without hunting down dumpers to cite them for their antigreen habits.

> Every once in a while amateur and illegal collectors, who freelance for immigrant households that do not pay for “supposedly” mandated county garbage pick-ups, will come in at night with panel trucks and trailers. They dump literally tons of garbage such as mattresses, sofas, TVs, appliances, tires, junk mail, and car seats on alleyways and in vineyards.

> Not long ago someone jettisoned in our vineyard hundreds of used florescent light bulbs, about 100 paint cans, and fifty-gallon drums of used oil and chemicals. Needles and drug paraphernalia are not uncommon. I’ve seen about five stripped-down cars abandoned on our property after being stolen. Last summer a huge semi-truck was left on our alleyway, picked cleaned down to the chassis.

> I used to ride a bicycle in our environs. I quit for a variety of reasons.

> If one is bit by unlicensed and unvaccinated roaming dogs— and there are many out here— and if their masters do not speak English or do not have legal status, then a nightmare follows of trying to get authorities to find the dogs and impound them before the owners or the dogs disappear. It is up to the bitten whether the decision to play the odds and not get painful, and sometimes dangerous, rabies shots is prudent or suicidal. As a doctor put it to me when I was bitten: “Rabid dogs are almost unheard of in the United States, but I have no idea of what is true of Mexico. Your call.”

> Less dramatically, I got tired of watching local canteen trucks drive out on our rural roads, pull their drainage plugs, and dump cooking waste or toss leftovers on the road.”

> Question: The Trump administration seems to be following the logic of MEF's Israel Victory Project launched in January 2017: it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, closed the PLO office in Washington, and cut funds to UNRWA and other Palestinians entities. With this, has your initial skepticism about President Trump's attitude towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict changed?

> Answer: I remain skeptical. I see Trump's grand Middle East goal to weaken the Iranian regime. Toward this end, he has rewarded the Saudis with arms sales and the Israelis with Jerusalem. The steps against the Palestinian Authority serve as pressure on it to come to the table and receive what I expect to be its reward, namely recognition of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. If I am right, things will not turn out well.

> During 1943, U.S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure.[6][7] The ban was ordered by Claude R. Wickard who held the position of Food Administrator, and took effect on January 18, 1943. According to The New York Times, officials explained that "the ready-sliced loaf must have a heavier wrapping than an unsliced one if it is not to dry out." It was also intended to counteract a rise in the price of bread, caused by the Office of Price Administration's authorization of a ten percent increase in flour prices.[8]

> In a Sunday radio address on January 24, New York City Mayor LaGuardia suggested that bakeries that had their own bread-slicing machines should be allowed to continue to use them, and on January 26, 1943, a letter appeared in The New York Times from a distraught housewife:

>> I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for each one—that's ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry![9]

> On January 26, however, John F. Conaboy, the New York Area Supervisor of the Food Distribution Administration, warned bakeries, delicatessens, and other stores that were continuing to slice bread to stop, saying that "to protect the cooperating bakeries against the unfair competition of those who continue to slice their own bread... we are prepared to take stern measures if necessary."[10]

> On March 8, 1943, the ban was rescinded. Wickard stated that "Our experience with the order, however, leads us to believe that the savings are not as much as we expected, and the War Production Board tells us that sufficient wax paper to wrap sliced bread for four months is in the hands of paper processor and the baking industry."[8]

btw you might recognize the name Wickard from this infamous case, which destroyed the Constitution forever:

Overwatch League players are not allowed to have pepe emotes. Dafran just quit OWL and put his emotes back up. Here's a mention of it (there's many, and this came up months ago when they made sinatraa take a tweet down):

> Independent sellers who offer new and used Apple products on Amazon will have their listings removed after January 4, 2019, under the new deal. Those sellers will need to apply to become Apple authorized resellers on Amazon to continue to offer their wares.

> As CNET points out, while this deal will provide customers with access to a greater selection of Apple products at standard prices, it could potentially impact the used Apple device market on the platform.

Overwatch teams hire new players primarily using *work sample tests* – they do *tryouts* where they see you *play the game*. Work sample tests are what patio11 and other wise people advise tech companies to use.

Is there an accurate term for this tactic of applying a principle or rule only when one thinks it helps one's own side? "Double standard" and "inconsistent" don't adequately convey the evil and dishonesty involved.

> [2018.10.15] If you're an American of European descent, there's a 60% chance you can be uniquely identified by public information in DNA databases. This is not information that you have made public; this is information your relatives have made public.

>> Abstract: Consumer genomics databases have reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement authorities have exploited some of these databases to identify suspects via distant familial relatives. Using genomic data of 1.28 million individuals tested with consumer genomics, we investigated the power of this technique. We project that about 60% of the searches for individuals of European-descent will result in a third cousin or closer match, which can allow their identification using demographic identifiers. Moreover, the technique could implicate nearly any US-individual of European-descent in the near future. We demonstrate that the technique can also identify research participants of a public sequencing project. Based on these results, we propose a potential mitigation strategy and policy implications to human subject research.

To do a DNA match with these databases they still have to have some of your DNA to match with, right? They need something like one of your hairs left at a crime scene.

The database just tells them "that hair came from Joe" where without it they'd just have a hair to try to match when they found a suspect by some other means.

Assuming I'm right about that, I'm unsure whether the database is a privacy violation in that particular application.

For thousands of years people have been able to see your face, and recognize it, and know (and tell authorities) you were in a particular place. That's just a less reliable method than DNA matching. People might not see your face, or they might not recognize you, or they might lie.

In particular this matters more in modern, large cities where you are mostly around people who do not know you (so can't recognize your face). Today you can conduct most of your activities and be seen but generally not recognized. That's something relatively new in human times. And also perhaps fleeting with the proliferation of cameras and face recognition.

But the fundamental problem of people knowing you were in a particular place whether you want them to know that or not has always existed. If you did, in fact, leave a hair at a crime scene I don't know that it violates your privacy to be able to identify that hair as yours prior to the existence of any other suspicious evidence about you.

Other than reliability, it doesn't seem different from the ability of someone to say "I saw Joe at the crime scene" prior to there being any other evidence you committed the crime. Neither prove in a legal sense or any other that you committed the crime, but both are reasons for the police to investigate you further.

Where I'd be concerned is if you leave a hair at a political protest or in a store, and someone uses that hair to identify you for political or marketing purposes. But I'd be equally concerned if they took your picture and used face recognition or pulled your fingerprint off a door handle or identified you by the MAC address of your phone's wifi adapter.

Basically I'm thinking the privacy violation is in who is collecting the sample to identify, and why they're collecting it. Not in the existence of a database to which samples can be matched.

DNA can be found years later, after you left. It can leave traces in many places around the world, info you didn't want saved. And it can do this in private places where no one would have seen you (or at least no one that you don't trust) – e.g. in a one-person bathroom, in a private residence, or in a business where you interact with one trusted person (e.g. massage or therapy). When you're seen, you often see that you were seen. And when you're seen by people you don't know and trust, that's generally *in public* and you know that you're in public and what it means.

(Trusted people will often give info about you *if an important crime was committed*. But maybe won't talk about you in most other situations, e.g. to a marketer.)

Also questioning witnesses is pretty limited and hard. You have to find them, then a person has a conversation they interpret, miscommunication happens, etc. Human interaction isn't cheap and doesn't scale well. But marketers or whoever could automate DNA collection – send a roomba-like robot around in public areas to scan for DNA and keep records of all DNA found at all locations at what times. Could make a huge database. That would be different than what being seen in public is like now.

There are already robots wandering the streets in some areas for food delivery purposes (and for testing purposes). A DNA pickup thing could go on the same robot.

Should it be illegal for people to consent to having their DNA sequenced and results stored in a database where those results can be used to identify others who did not consent?

Should it be illegal for DNA sequencers to offer sequencing for one price if you don't consent to being in their database, and another (lower) price if you do? My understanding is that's effectively what's going on now - sequencing is artificially cheap because the sequencers expect to profit from the data, not just what they charge you for sequencing.

Should it be illegal to pick up genetic material from your own property and sequence that? Should it be OK to sequence it but not to match it using a database of public records of stuff like relationships + the DNA of people who consented?

Or should the databases and sequencing and matching be legal but only certain uses of them regulated (like marketing or politics stuff)? What uses should be OK and what illegal?

Or instead of laws do you want some or all of the above enforced by social conventions and shaming/boycotts of violators or other non-government/non-force methods?

Or...?

As I said before I'm personally uncomfortable with people using identification tech for certain political and marketing functions. But I can't see a way out of it without violating other rights.

I don't really care if the technology is automated face recognition, walk recognition, speech recognition, MAC or IMEI identification, fingerprints, passport or other RFID sources, or DNA sequencing. I don't think it makes sense to single out one technology from the others. I'd look for some general principles that would include an explanation about what's private and what's not, and who can do what with private information. And I'd look for that to be compatible with our traditions about other rights like property.

European regulations such as GDPR attempt to do this...with (IMO) disastrous and highly rights-infringing results. I think such regulations are worse than nothing.

You're right that DNA is different in some of the ways you mention from past stuff. I think that's part of how we're talking past each other, since I thought I was clear in my original comment that DNA is different in some ways. I don't think the ways you pointed out DNA is different contradicted my original comment, though they did extend / expand on the differences significantly.

I agree you only stated the problem and had not proposed any solution, statist or otherwise.

But I also think that claiming there's a problem with something being a violation of privacy is not like claiming there's a problem with the weather being awful or life being too short. There's an important cultural context to claiming that something is a violation of privacy. Politically powerful movements exist to forcibly restrict what data is allowed to be collected, stored, shared, processed, etc. It's a matter of active controversy.

Privacy is a right and the state is currently a big part of how rights violations are addressed in our society. If you complain about DNA databases being a privacy violation and you don't propose a solution, people will reasonably assume you are likely in favor of some kind of government regulation of such databases. Maybe you're not! Which is why I suggested perhaps you had some non-statist solutions in mind.

Do you disagree about the cultural context of claiming that something is a privacy violation?

I'm confused about an argument in Realism and the Aim of Science p313 (about the subjective interpretation of "p(a|b)=r"):

"It may be said in passing that the subjectivist would be mistaken if he believed he could interpret [betting] by saying that we do not bet that a will happen but rather upon a conditional statement. For the probability of a conditional is very different from a conditional (or relative) probability, as may be seen as follows. Let b again be our total knowledge, c the conditions of the game; then, he may suggest, we do not bet upon a (given b) but upon 'if c then a' (given b); and after applying the rule of absolution, upon 'if c then a', absolutely. This interpretation is not compatible with the laws of the probability calculus, since 'if c then a' will have higher probability than a; unless, indeed, c is part of b, in which case the condition c loses its force; that is to say, we have in this case b=bc, and as a consequence, p(if c then a|b) = p(a|b) and there is no reason why, after applying the rule of absolution, we should obtain the present probability of 'if c then a', rather than the present probability of a."

Why will 'if c then a' have a higher probability than a, and how does that violate the laws of the probability calculus?

*a* is *a* universally, unconditionally. *if c then a* is a conditional, limited version of *a* saying that *a* must be true in some scenarios (*c*) but not making that claim for some other scenarios (non-c). so it's a weaker claim.

Example:

a = my dog will die this year

c = my dog is over 50 years old

*if my dog is over 50 years old, then my dog will die this year* is more probable than *my dog will die this year*.

This is a very basic thing. This is supposed to be trivial for a person who is going to follow Popper, so this and many other basic things can be built on and the reader's focus can ~all be directed to more advanced issues. It seems you're trying to read things while missing the important prerequisites. I think you're fooling yourself about your capabilities and it is sabotaging your progress. I don't think you want to hear that criticism. But it's not reasonable to ask for help while not wanting the perspective of someone who knows the answer and thinks in line with this forum's ideas. I think you could learn a lot more, and a lot faster, by a different approach, and this is important, and that you are not open to this possibility and that, given your refusal to even consider doing things a better way, you should stop asking for help from the people you disagree with and are dismissive of.

>If you’re wondering how this insane state of affairs came to be, remember that conservatives aren’t demonized and censored based on how Right-wing they are. They are targeted according to how effective they become. That’s why Richard Spencer and David Duke are still on Twitter, while Gavin, Laura Loomer, Roger Stone and I–some of the most popular and persuasive people in the Trump movement, none of us remotely racist–are all banned.

That's a really common type of logical fail. It is complaining about an unlimited/universal comparison (comparing two things *in general*) in response to a limited/specific comparison (comparing two things in *one particular way*). And he's correct that the two things are quite different *in general* (MVP player of season 1 overwatch league vs. a player who was on a tier 2 team, like the minor league basically, and is now gonna be promoted for season 2 and is fairly likely to be a bottom-50% level player, not an MVP.)

I see this a lot. I make a comparison between X and Y regarding issue Z. People say "X and Y are not comparable" because they think of some other point of comparison. It's like "Apples and oranges are a similar size" and they are like "Apples and oranges are not similar, they taste totally different". They wouldn't make this error with that exact example but they will make it when things get slightly more complicated or less clearly communicated, especially when there is some sort of major difference (like literal MVP vs. more middling player, or if you're doing a comparison involving Hitler).

Example where people would fuck it up: you're arguing about some random artist, call him Joe, who you think is a hack. So you discuss a bit and the guy says "artists are all inspired wonderful people" and you say "no, some artists are bad, see hitler" and he says back "Hitler and Joe are totally different, wtf is wrong with you for comparing them?". Logically that's a clueless response, and it's understandable for Hitler to come to mind as an example of a bad person who was also an artist (tho as a practical matter it may be wiser to pick another example if you aren't talking to a highly logical person). Point is it's the same issue where you made a comparison *for a specific purpose* and his response is that the two things are different *in general* (which is true but irrelevant).

The reason this happens a lot is people are what I call *gist thinkers* – they think/read/listen in terms of vague, approximate gists instead of the actual precise meanings of things. They read something in order to figure out the rough idea or ballpark of what it says, but they don't know what it actually says. For a person who does that, they will see two things are being compared (which really is the rough idea of what was said) and respond that way. (Within the methodology of what they are doing, they get everything right! They are correct that the vague gist was a comparison of X and Y, and they are also correct that X and Y are quite different in major ways.) Many people approximate stuff to the rough idea of it all the time (the main exceptions are people who are good at one thing, which is usually their profession, and do some good precise thinking about that – there are quite a few people who are good at something but then dumb in general, and that is more common than being good at two things let alone good at lots of things).

The gist thinker thing was one of the main issues in this discussion with Scuro about perception:

Specifically when he was claiming that Ayn Rand wrote that *perception develops* in ITOE, the issue was Scuro can't read precisely. He could only read some rough approximation of what Rand said – which he interpreted as himself having read what she actually said (he doesn't know the difference, doesn't know that he's thinking in rough approximations and that other people think more precisely – and if you try to tell him that he'll just hate you and it won't lead to progress). So what would happen is he'd try to show the text said it by quoting a sentence where he saw it being said, and then I would read that sentence and it just plain did not say that. And because he can't think precisely, he could never say *where* in the quote it said what he claimed it said, he couldn't do word-by-word analysis because all he can do when reading is take a whole section of text and then get the gist of it. But there's no clear, precise logical process by which he does that, so he can't break it down into steps and show me, logically, the steps by which he gets from the words as written by Rand to his claim about them. I asked him for that but he just couldn't do it and dropped the subject and moved on to something else (and then a bit later, he went to sleep instead of answering some point and then didn't follow up the next day, nor the next, nor the next) – but then, weeks later, he remembered it as him having won the debate on that point!

Ayn Rand Institute email newsletter today (they are bad at their jobs so they did not include a link to view it on a webpage, so sorry no link):

> Since 2012, the Tuesday following “Black Friday” has been publicized as “Giving Tuesday.” Touted as a “remedy” for the “selfish commercialism” of the holiday shopping season, the idea is that charitable contributions (“giving back”) will relieve the guilt you’re expected to be feeling.

> Ayn Rand observed that, while there’s nothing wrong with helping others who are worthy of help when you can afford it, charity is not a moral duty. More importantly, she thought people should act on the “trader principle,” freely exchanging value for value to mutual benefit.

> **So, at ARI we decided to turn #GivingTuesday into #TradingTuesday.**

> We are proposing that you make an investment in an ARI program of historical significance—the recording of twelve oral history interviews with people actively involved in the Objectivist movement at the early stages of its development. Your support will allow us to preserve these powerful stories and share them with generations to come.

> Here’s an example of an oral history audio clip with Dina Federman, a philosopher who participated in ARI’s advanced training programs in the 1990s. She lectured and wrote for ARI before her untimely death from cancer in 2016.

> **A group of anonymous donors has pledged to match #TradingTuesday contributions to ARI, up to $50,000.**

> If we achieve our goal of $50,000, we’ll have raised a total of $100,000 (including matching funds). This could produce **twelve oral histories in the next year**, ideally recorded in people’s homes with our video crew. The twelve individuals we hope to interview are in their 80s. Some were close to Ayn Rand and all were present at the founding of the Objectivist movement.

ARI is complaining about "Giving Tuesday" and saying that *Trading* Tuesday would be better.

Then they say they got some *donors* to pledge 50k, they are doing scammy donation matching on it, and they want you to donate too. How the fuck is that trading? They are such dishonest liars. This is total bullshit. This is no different than any other charity asking for a donation and in return what you get is the charity uses the money to fund their mission (and you donate cuz you like that mission, whether it's breast cancer cure research or recording oral history of Objectivists before they die.)

No doubt George Reisman (who is in his 80s) is *not* one of the twelve individuals they would like to interview.

I sign my posts here Dagny. I'm far more worthy of the name than ARI is.

This is an important point. On official forums for a game, the game company can delete criticism, and they often do. On the Facebook page, they can and often do delete criticism. But they can't delete critical tweets. If you want to see if people are unhappy with a decision by a big company, or what the majority of people's reaction is, looking on twitter will work better than looking on facebook (which they can censor just as much as their own forum).

> *a* is *a* universally, unconditionally. *if c then a* is a conditional, limited version of *a* saying that *a* must be true in some scenarios (*c*) but not making that claim for some other scenarios (non-c). so it's a weaker claim.

>Example:

>a = my dog will die this year

>c = my dog is over 50 years old

>*if my dog is over 50 years old, then my dog will die this year* is more probable than *my dog will die this year*.

if c = *my dog is under 1 year old*, then why couldn't the probability of if c then a be 1% and therefore less than the probability of a which is 10%?

And what laws of probability inform your argument? I still don't see how Popper shows that this violates the laws of probability.

>This is a very basic thing. This is supposed to be trivial for a person who is going to follow Popper, so this and many other basic things can be built on and the reader's focus can ~all be directed to more advanced issues. It seems you're trying to read things while missing the important prerequisites. I think you're fooling yourself about your capabilities and it is sabotaging your progress. I don't think you want to hear that criticism. But it's not reasonable to ask for help while not wanting the perspective of someone who knows the answer and thinks in line with this forum's ideas. I think you could learn a lot more, and a lot faster, by a different approach, and this is important, and that you are not open to this possibility and that, given your refusal to even consider doing things a better way, you should stop asking for help from the people you disagree with and are dismissive of.

I don't know why you create paranoid theories about me such as that I don't want to hear criticism the content of which I am unaware of. By commenting on this platform, I am openly subjecting myself to your horrible personality already (and because you replied to me I guess you could predict I *would* read your reply and subject myself to it), and still you don't want to suggest an actually *substantial* criticism because you fear I wouldn't be open to *that*, and you prefer to bear the cost of sinking your time and reputation into insulting me with empty paranoia, rather than state what you think is useful information?

The probability that your dog will die in the next year IF it's under 1 year old, is the probability that your dog is under 1 year old multiplied by the probability that a 0-1 year old dog will die in the next year. All the times your dog is the wrong age are success cases for the conditional statement. The conditional statement makes a weaker claim, it makes claims about fewer cases, so out of all cases (not just the cases it makes claims about) it's less likely to be mistaken because it says less.

> still you don't want to suggest an actually *substantial* criticism

I don't know what you're talking about. Telling you how logic works – and that you didn't know it – is a substantial criticism. It has substance (about the nature of logic). It addresses the issue. And there is a criticism there, not only positive education.

The format of what I said was to deal with the substance *and* then to also say a second thing.

Your comments about paranoia are unwelcome (unproductive, hostile, Szasz-contradicting, and not backed up with paths forward) and discourage me from responding to you. "horrible personality" was also unproductive nastiness. All of my meta comments were intended to address an actual problem I see, but you don't seem to follow the same policy.

Are you willing to change anything you're doing, or are you just going to keep asking for help with specific chunks of stuff, while offering no value in return (and being quite hostile which makes it way harder), and also not using learning methodology I think is effective? If you plan to continue in the same vein, give me some reasons to respond to you further, or I expect that I won't. (I don't think this problem, involving me considering just ignoring you going forward, is ignorable to focus *only* on the substance, but I did give you the substantive answer too, I did both, which I think is reasonable.)

Evan, one of the reasons I haven't replied to you is that you had a conversation in YouTube comments with Alan where you said at the outset you wanted to go through the issues one by one, but then you stopped responding, without explanation, before even finishing one. It's one of many times you have not finished what you started nor explained what was going on. That makes you a bad person to begin joint projects with. You start things you apparently aren't interested in finishing or reaching success at, and that isn't good for the people offering you free help. You also behaved very badly on FI and were hostile and nasty to me personally, and you have not apologized nor, more importantly, done something to address what went wrong to fix the problem going forward.

I also think your distaste for thinking and talking about goals/plans, background knowledge and learning methodology makes it much harder to help you successfully and also harder to know what success looks like and whether that is even something I would want. (You could use the help to spread misconceptions about Popper while doing a better job of sounding like you know what you're talking about, or just it to impress friends with. You might or might not aspire to do things that are important to me, I don't know. And if you do aspire to things that are important to me, you might or might not have reasonable ways to pursue those achievements, but based on the limited info available to me currently, I'd guess not. This stuff is important. I have helped educate people before who have then used the knowledge for purposes that I think make the world worse.)

If you just want individual answers to individual questions, without any bigger picture being involved, that is tutoring and you should pay money for it. If you aren't trying to engage in a joint project or join the community, you just want help on demand with the problems of your choice for your own unstated purposes, and you don't want to offer stuff in return, then buy it.

> If in a particular example the probability of both c and a being false is zero, then the probability of a is equal to the probability of 'if c then a'.

I initially read this as meaning c and a both can't be false, individually. But I think you meant they can't both be false at the same time, together (but one or the other could be false). The writing is a bit unclear FYI.

> I initially read this as meaning c and a both can't be false, individually. But I think you meant they can't both be false at the same time, together (but one or the other could be false). The writing is a bit unclear FYI.

Thank you. You are correct about what I meant.

Now I see that I was unclear.

A possible rewrite of my last sentence: If c and a are never both false at the same time (that is, the probability of c and a both being false at the same time is zero), then the probability of a is equal to the probability of 'if c then a'.

Dagny by insubstantial I was referring to your claim that I'm not open to your better way of learning that you won't state. To make that claim out of nowhere is so socially repulsive I would guess you have no friends. You could learn that it's incorrect to do this by going outside ever and talking to someone. Paranoia means theories about people that are irrational and cause you fear.

Elliot you are a person who wastes his time slandering people. I'm sorry I didn't respond to Alan's last comment for awhile but I was homeless and hungry, looking for jobs and places to stay for a few months starting roughly around that time. I fully expect that you will eventually hate me so much that you block me on all your websites or whatever. I don't know what goes on in your head and I find your particular emotional problem uninteresting because you even explicitly oppose altruism. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. I've had moral integrity from a very young age and can't relate. You need socialization badly. I tried to help you in twitter dms. Maybe you have a delusion that you shouldn't do things people recommend until they respond to the games you play with discussions and launching highly irrational criticisms at every detail of people's claims, making your discussions intractable. I come on here to discuss important things like philosophy, and the only use you can find for it is to try to create interpersonal drama. It is no wonder no one likes you, and you will only get dumber and dumber if you keep wasting your time like this.

#11403 I think Evan half wants *mentoring* and half doesn't (he partly tries to act like a peer or expert), and won't clearly figure it out in his own mind, let alone present the situation clearly to the other people he is asking for help.

Mentoring is different than tutoring. It's commonly an unpaid, longterm thing done for people who are especially promising/deserving (as against tutoring which is commonly done with whoever wants to hire a tutor, not necessarily a good student). Mentoring is earned by being a great learner who is a joy to work with, so the mentor is happy to pass on his knowledge. In return the mentor gets interesting questions, an energetic person studying and discussing things he cares about, and a new person to share the knowledge with others in the future. There are various ways that Evan is not behaving like a good mentoring candidate. And he hasn't asked for mentoring, nor for tutoring. He just doesn't want to say or think about what he *is* asking for.

In general, a tutor works for a client and helps the client with the client's goals. A mentor has his own goals and the mentee values and helps with the mentor's goals, and is receptive to advice about what to learn, what to do, what goals to have, the mentor's advice about what approaches to use to make progress, etc.

Asking for mentoring basically requires openly admitting being below someone. curi had no trouble doing that (with DD) because he doesn't have a big ego (in the usual sense of the term), but it's a big problem for most people who are age 20+ and think they are smart (and often really are smarter, in lots of ways, than most people they've met). Some people may believe that it's easier to ask DD for mentoring than to ask curi because DD is more prestigious (he has higher social status: a published book and some physics awards and papers back then, and a PhD and being an honorary professor, now a second book and he joined the royal society and gave some TED talks). Those people who focus on social status, and are not adequately impressed by curi's accomplishments, are poor candidates for curi to mentor anyway. They often try to treat curi as a peer, lose several arguments (often they stop replying before a clear conclusion), and then curi thinks that was enough of a demonstration that they should change their attitude but they don't get it.

People who don't acknowledge curi as the best living philosopher are not going to respect his time and value his help as much as people who do. So they generally offer a worse deal to curi who, in any case, spends a lot of time on his own stuff which often outcompetes people's requests for help (but he does remain available a fair amount and it could be more if a person or project interested him enough).

Evan is not alone in this ambiguity about what kind of help he wants: mentoring/tutoring/something-else. He also keeps it ambiguous about whether he wants a lot of help (as part of some longer term goals or plans) or just the occasional individual little thing. People on FI are, in general, pretty vague about whether they want mentoring, tutoring, or something else.

And Evan, like a fair amount of people, is very hostile to meta discussion, so it makes it harder to figure out things like this.

> I'm sorry I didn't respond to Alan's last comment for awhile but I was homeless and hungry, looking for jobs and places to stay for a few months starting roughly around that time.

Doesn't matter. You could have continued on your schedule, whenever you were available, e.g. now, instead of switching projects to these Popper questions and to flaming FI people. You have a history of dropping projects, not just by delays but by then focusing on some new project *instead* of continuing, which is different than being busy with non-philosophy for a few months.

Evan thinks if he isn't actually BANNED then he must be welcome here in some sense, not have crossed the line too much.

There are a lot of ppl who basically only listen to punishments and think if you don’t punish then you aren’t serious and don't mind.

It’s awkward here cuz TCS people don’t like punishing or forcing. So they often *ask* for things instead, but then people react like "oh he's only asking, so that doesn't really matter and I can just do whatever".

So Evan got told he was unwelcome to do certain things, then did that. And he expects to get banned for it, but he does it anyway. He thinks bans are just part of how normal interactions between people go. It doesn't occur to him to stop when he's unwelcome and has been asked to stop, rather than to keep pushing and troublemaking until he has to be banned.

Evan's response to that is to keep flaming people and doing the unwelcome things, and then also saying:

> I fully expect that you will eventually hate me so much that you block me on all your websites or whatever.

What a jerk to do things he expects to be hated and knows are unwelcome. And why "eventually" instead of literally today? But anyway, he thinks that all verbal requests are minor things and actions (banhammers) speak louder than words. It's a very common and bad attitude to life. Things shouldn't have to escalate so much for problems to get solved.

>I don't know what goes on in your head and I find your particular emotional problem uninteresting because you even explicitly oppose altruism. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. I've had moral integrity from a very young age and can't relate. You need socialization badly.

This is a combination of

1) ignorance of Ayn Rand's moral philosophy and

2) vicious, nasty, cruel personal attacks

What's interesting to me is that Evan engages in this combination of ignorance and malevolence while pleading his moral integrity.

This will let me make newsletter links that load faster. The comment limited feature couldn't be used with permalinks before because if you limit to the 20 latest comments and ppl post 20 new comments then the thing you were linking wouldn't be included anymore.

> Dagny by insubstantial I was referring to your claim that I'm not open to your better way of learning that you won't state. To make that claim out of nowhere is so socially repulsive I would guess you have no friends. You could learn that it's incorrect to do this by going outside ever and talking to someone. Paranoia means theories about people that are irrational and cause you fear.

i find it interesting that evan has interpreted the situation as though Dagny is experiencing fear.

> Elliot you are a person who wastes his time slandering people. I'm sorry I didn't respond to Alan's last comment for awhile but I was homeless and hungry, looking for jobs and places to stay for a few months starting roughly around that time. I fully expect that you will eventually hate me so much that you block me on all your websites or whatever. I don't know what goes on in your head and I find your particular emotional problem uninteresting because you even explicitly oppose altruism. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

How would evan know that elliot’s position on altruism is dumb? he doesn’t say whether or not he’s even investigated it, let alone understood it to the point that he could make an honest judgement of it.

> I've had moral integrity from a very young age and can't relate.

I don’t think Evan knows what the word integrity means. he's sorta implying that elliot has doesn't something that goes against his principles but as far as i can see, elliot has not done that, and evan has not explained (nor even stated without explanation) that elliot has acted contrary to his principles.

> You need socialization badly. I tried to help you in twitter dms. Maybe you have a delusion that you shouldn't do things people recommend until they respond to the games you play with discussions and launching highly irrational criticisms at every detail of people's claims, making your discussions intractable.

evan doesn’t seem to be giving elliot the benefit of the doubt. whether or not somebody should take somebody else’s suggestion depends on whether or not he’s convinced that doing the suggestion would benefit him. so if somebody suggests that i read something, i’m not doing it unless i’m convinced i’ll benefit. that may involve asking the suggestor to tell me what’s good about it, how it will benefit me, etc. if that discussion ends without me being convinced, i’m not reading what was suggested.

> I come on here to discuss important things like philosophy, and the only use you can find for it is to try to create interpersonal drama. It is no wonder no one likes you, and you will only get dumber and dumber if you keep wasting your time like this.

but it’s not true that no one likes elliot. i think he’s the best. i’m glad to know him and glad for our interactions.

one thing i especially like about elliot is his honesty. especially his honesty about how i’m behaving. *especially* his honesty about cases where i’m being dishonest. he’s shining a light on something that i’m refusing to shine a light on myself (and no else i know has shined a light on). i appreciate that very much. No one else is good/smart enough to treat me that way. (Well maybe there are others who are good/smart enough but they haven’t done it, so I wouldn’t know.)

Saying he tried to help me in Twitter DMs is not honest. It wasn't even about philosophy. He just tried to get me to hate/reject PUA or something ... while knowing absolutely nothing about my personal/dating life and what problems it does and doesn't have.

> i find it interesting that evan has interpreted the situation as though Dagny is experiencing fear.

This comment is either passive-aggressive (against Evan) or it's really socially oblivious. "Interesting" can be literal, but it's a very commonly used word for equivocations and not directly saying what one actually means. In this case, it appears to be a standard interesting=bad kinda use where the person meant that Evan was wrong and dumb, and wanted to draw attention to the issue, but didn't want to say it openly.

>> i find it interesting that evan has interpreted the situation as though Dagny is experiencing fear.

> This comment is either passive-aggressive (against Evan) or it's really socially oblivious. "Interesting" can be literal, but it's a very commonly used word for equivocations and not directly saying what one actually means. In this case, it appears to be a standard interesting=bad kinda use where the person meant that Evan was wrong and dumb, and wanted to draw attention to the issue, but didn't want to say it openly.

> President Trump has hundreds of unfilled presidentially appointed positions because Democrats have stalled the nominations process out as much as their diminished power in the post-nuclear Senate has allowed. But it is the Republican majority that has placed a total blockade on the usual safety valve for temporary appointments – the recess appointment power – by refusing to go on recess for the last two years. And with Democrats set to take the House and be in position to deny the Senate consent to recess starting January 3, there is a real possibility that President Trump will go an entire presidential term without being able to make recess appointments.

> It has been nearly eight years since the United States Senate officially recessed – a streak aided by the practice of holding so-called pro forma sessions every three days throughout every adjournment.

> President Bill Clinton used the recess appointment power 139 times, including 96 full-time positions. President George W. Bush used it 171 times, including 99 full-time positions.

> You might reasonably expect no president will ever get recess appointments again except when the same party controls the House, Senate, and president. But for the last two years, the same party – the Republican Party – has in fact controlled the House, Senate, and president. And yet, the Senate has never recessed.

> What a jerk to do things he expects to be hated and knows are unwelcome. And why "eventually" instead of literally today? But anyway, he thinks that all verbal requests are minor things and actions (banhammers) speak louder than words. It's a very common and bad attitude to life.

>These people – almost everyone – only state requests as a last resort, as a major escalation. So if you make a request to them, they think it's an ultimatum, a very strong demand with no flexibility, no remaining opportunity to negotiate or discuss.

My guess is that in most social situations Evan would probably act like most ppl and consider a verbal request a big deal. He’d want to get along with ppl and have smooth social interactions. In order to achieve this, he’d take requests seriously. Furthermore, like most ppl, he’d often try to guess what the other person wants and then preemptively do that so they don’t even have to verbally ask (this fits with him being altruistic).

But this social situation is *different* to him.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but he clearly doesn’t give a fuck about the interaction going well. He’s fully expecting (maybe welcoming??) being banned or hated or whatever and doesn’t seem to care. So, with these ideas by his side, maybe he’s given himself license to be a jerk and try to attack and hurt ET. He sort of comes off as though he’s fed up (with something?) and not going to take it anymore. Also, he sort of comes off as though he’s testing the situation. And when there’s no downside to him (e.g. he’s not afraid of being banned or hated in this case), then he’s willing to see just how far he can push it.

>> These people – almost everyone – only state requests as a last resort, as a major escalation. So if you make a request to them, they think it's an ultimatum, a very strong demand with no flexibility, no remaining opportunity to negotiate or discuss.

> My guess is that in most social situations Evan would probably act like most ppl and consider a verbal request a big deal. He’d want to get along with ppl and have smooth social interactions. In order to achieve this, he’d take requests seriously. Furthermore, like most ppl, he’d often try to guess what the other person wants and then preemptively do that so they don’t even have to verbally ask (this fits with him being altruistic).

Evan being relatively conventional when it comes to requests is also consistent with him not wanting to come out and directly ask for what he wants. Dagny talked about this in #11415.

> “His chief promises were that he would build the wall, defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson said, adding that those goals were probably lost causes. Trump, he said, doesn’t understand the system, and his own agencies don’t support him.

> “He knows very little about the legislative process, hasn’t learned anything, hasn’t surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn’t done all the things you need to do, so it’s mostly his fault that he hasn’t achieved those things,” he added.

#11449 Tucker is partly saying that to imply that *he* knows how to do those things if he were Prez. He would surround himself with the right ppl (and way more ppl think that means them than there are slots for), he knows how legislation works and can get things done, etc.

This kind of self-serving self-promotion is not reliable as information about other ppl like Trump.

Also, when Carlson says those things – wall, fixing healthcare, stop tax-funding PP – are lost causes, doesn't that mean he in fact *does not* know how to get things done? Cause it doesn't sound like he's saying they are lost cause *for Trump* but he could do them. We need a prez who thinks those are NOT lost causes! (esp wall and healthcare, the PP thing is a way smaller issue)

> #11449 Tucker is partly saying that to imply that *he* knows how to do those things if he were Prez. He would surround himself with the right ppl (and way more ppl think that means them than there are slots for), he knows how legislation works and can get things done, etc.

> This kind of self-serving self-promotion is not reliable as information about other ppl like Trump.

I agree Tucker is self promoting but his criticisms also seemed kinda fair overall.

> Also, when Carlson says those things – wall, fixing healthcare, stop tax-funding PP – are lost causes, doesn't that mean he in fact *does not* know how to get things done? Cause it doesn't sound like he's saying they are lost cause *for Trump* but he could do them. We need a prez who thinks those are NOT lost causes! (esp wall and healthcare, the PP thing is a way smaller issue)

It was ambiguous to me what he meant by lost causes. He could mean doomed to fail from start, or lost cause at this point in Trump's term with Dems taking House (but maybe hope in future), or now a lost cause forever cuz Trump failed.

i watched a video called "This Is Why You're Fat" by the infographic show, it was really bad.

it literally never mentioned calories in vs calories out, and at 6:25 it says "stick to low fat and low calorie food", how does that help for weight loss? so what if its 50% fat? how many calories is it? calories is the only thing that matters for long term weight loss

it dissed fast food as well for no reason. i guess its a common enough cultural believe that fast food is bad, that you can mention fast food in passing in a video on how to lose weight, and it implies fast food is bad.

it also is spreading myths to make you eat more, at 2:46 "everyone knows you cant have dessert until after you eat your dinner, but maybe its time to skip dessert all together", but what if dessert is my favorite part? does that mean i HAVE to eat dinner if i am only interested in the dessert? why cant i just skip dinner? or maybe have a dinner i actually like so i dont feel like i need dessert. it never answers those questions, or gives alternatives.

good advice in the video: dont shop while hungry, that makes sense. when your shopping for food, youll look at a food and think "yeah id eat that" and then buy it, even if you dislike it compared to other foods that you usually buy, or you buy to much food cuz you constantly think "id eat that" cuz your hungry right now.

The Ayn Rand Institute: seeking donors on the basis of their special government privileges. I think getting the privilege may be OK, and mentioning it too, but not *focusing lots of attention on it, as if government privileges are a major selling point*. Ayn Rand would be appalled.

> Take that ghastly soul-destroying document, the curriculum vitae. It is as inherently inflationary as clipping the coinage or fiat money. A friend of mine, whom I knew to be competent and conscientious, consistently failed to be appointed to positions for which he was eminently qualified. My wife, who knew the ways of modern appointment committees, asked to see the curriculum vitae he was supplying with his applications for the jobs.

> She was horrified: He would never get a job with such a curriculum, it was far too old-fashioned. It gave merely his formal qualifications and the positions he had previously held, with references. No, no, said my wife to him, what you need is to boast. You have to make out that your piddling research might be chosen very soon for a Nobel Prize, that your occasional good deeds were as at great a personal sacrifice as those of Mother Teresa, and that you are a person whose outside interests are carried out at levels equal to the professional; in other words that you are multitalented, multivalent, and quite out of the ordinary. Moreover, your ambition must be to save the world, to be a pioneer and a path-breaker, not merely to do your best in the circumstances. You must be grandiose, not modest.

> Of course, every other applicant would be similarly boastful, and so, like star architects trying to outdo each other in the outlandish nature of their buildings, my friend’s boasts had to be preposterous, quite out of keeping with his admirable character. But once he had swallowed the bitter pill of realism, he was appointed at once. We all have to be Barons Munchausen now.

> The U.S. school lunch program is making room on menus again for noodles, biscuits, tortillas and other foods made mostly of refined grains.

> The Trump administration is scaling back contested school lunch standards implemented under the Obama administration including one that required only whole grains be served. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday *only half the grains served will need to be whole grains*, a change it said will do away with the current bureaucracy of requiring schools to obtain special waivers to serve select refined grains foods.

Emphasis added. One step towards evil, half a step back to reasonableness? This still sucks. Same with allowing only low fat chocolate milk instead of none, it's only making it partially better and it's still worse than the past.

> An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.

> But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

They actually called *themselves* censors.

> The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a “utopian narrative” that has been “undermined” by recent global events as well as “bad behavior” on the part of users. It can be read in full below.

> The briefing argues that Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are caught between two incompatible positions, the “unmediated marketplace of ideas” vs. “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility.”

> The first approach is described as a product of the “American tradition” which “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility.” The second is described as a product of the “European tradition,” which “favors dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.” The briefing claims that all tech platforms are now moving toward the European tradition.

jfc. good article. it's well worth reading more highlights from the document.

this paragraph from their article "Heroes of the Storm News" talks about it,

>Over the past several years, the work of evaluating our development processes and making hard decisions has led to new games and other products that we’re proud of. **We now have more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history.** We’re also at a point where we need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we’re excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they’ll bring to those projects. **This isn’t the first time we’ve had to make tough choices like this. Games like Diablo II, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Overwatch, and more would not exist had we not made similar decisions in the past**.

bold added to parts i thought were important.

i think it justifies their decisions cuz they have unannounced games (i took "projects" to mean games). and they need good people to work on them, and they have good people in their other games, so their gonna take them and put them on other projects

#11460 Why choose this to debate, out of all the topics? What value would you get out of being corrected or correcting me on this topic? Less compared to tons of other topics, right? And you don't seem to know much about Blizzard or to have read the reddit response very thoroughly.

#11462 thx for the link, it's nice to see people's responses. But unfortunately I think the review is much lower quality than its writing style tries to convey. Some issues:

> The distinction between the economic definitions of socialism and communism are simple. Communism refers to complete state control of the means of production. Socialism means some state control of the means of production.

This is sloppy at best. By that definition, the US is a socialist country. The US clearly has *some* state control of the means of production. By calling a mixed economy "socialism", the reviewer is debating terminology (contra Popper) instead of the issues, and he's making discussion harder by making socialism refer to a huge array of different things, some of them commonly (and reasonably) associated with quite a bit of capitalism. Bernie Sanders wants to change the US into a socialist country because he doesn't think it is one currently. On that, I agree with him. And by weakening the meaning of socialism, so it has less to do with any particular principles, ideologies, or system of beliefs, and just refers to pretty much every compromise system, then you get something that's bad for discussion, that fails to try to offer a positive vision for a good world. Reisman is completely correct to discuss socialism as meaningful a vision for how to organize society, not as a set of cowardly equivocations that some socialists retreated to to dodge criticism.

> If you are already determined to hate Marxism in all it's form this essay should fit nicely into your collection. If you are looking for a critical in-depth analysis of the subject I would look elsewhere. This is not a particularly enlightening work and many of the points made have been made more articulately before.

Which points were made where before?

This kind of claim, without details, isn't convincing. The vast majority of people cannot reliably judge if two arguments are approximately the same or dramatically different, if the arguments have some noticeable similarities.

And it matters who said it before, and when. Was it someone no one reads from the 1800s? Was it Mises, Reisman's teacher? Was it someone popular, modern and separate from the Austrian tradition? Repeating something well known is an issue. Repeating something obscure that no one knows would offer value. And it often makes sense to repeat some ideas while introducing new ones (so you can build on them prior ideas).

It's hard to comment more specifically due to the lack of specifics in the accusation.

> Regardless I would recommend a reading of Das kapital volume 1 paired with either David Harvey's college course on volume 1 which can be found on youtube or his book "A Companion to Marx's Capital v1," before reading any in depth criticism. Naturally I would also recommend v2 and v3 of Das Kapital for those with a further interest in how Marx's vision of capitalism changes when he relaxes the equilibrium and value assumptions. These volumes address all of the criticisms leveled by Mr. Reisman in the second half of this work.

This would be far more convincing with an example or at least a citation. Which argument of Reisman is refuted by which argument from which author in what passage of what book? Give a summary or at least enough of a reference for me to look it up and see you're right – and then maybe i'll consider reading hundreds of pages. But don't refer me to hundreds of pages and say that somewhere in there I will find rebuttals to multiple non-specific Reisman arguments. That's unreasonable. There is no way for me to ever know which things the reviewer even believed to be the rebuttals to what. It's not as if the books being recommended, which predate Reisman's book, would quote Reisman's points and give responses to each.

> “Torres, who represents the Fordham Road and Tremont sections of the Bronx, says that “a cashless business model . . . will have the effect of excluding lower-income communities of color from what should be an open and free market.” The very poor are “unbanked,” he says, and disproportionately black and Latino; thus, cashless businesses are demonstrably discriminatory against them. “No matter what the intention was,” explains Torres, “its effect is discriminatory.”

> Torres’s notion of effective discrimination could be extended well beyond cashless restaurants. Take, say, expensive restaurants. The omakase menu at Masa—the costliest eatery in the country—costs $595 for 18 pieces of sushi. Though the restaurant accepts cash and credit cards, it’s specifically designed to exclude people who can’t afford to eat there. It doesn’t matter what Masayoshi Takayama intended when he set up a restaurant that charges more for a party of two to eat dinner than most New York households earn in a week; he’s effectively discriminating, Torres would argue. And if we start requiring restaurants to accept folding money or a handful of change as payment, why not also demand that they include fare at every price point on their menus, so even the poorest customers can feel welcome? Perhaps Torres’s reform effort should also be extended to online purchases, which are virtually impossible to make without a bank card. Let’s require that Amazon accept cash, as should Uber and Lyft and other firms whose business model discriminates—intentionally or not—against people who don’t have bank cards connected to their accounts.”

cuz i had thoughts about it so i wrote them, i want to do that more cuz usually i dont, and i think it would be good for me to say stuff more.

>What value would you get out of being corrected or correcting me on this topic? Less compared to tons of other topics, right?

i dont see how i would get any value out of it, or how anyone else could. would it be a waste of time for both of us if we discuss it? should i think about how much value i would gain from discussing something, before i try to discuss it? e.g: discussing with socialists would probably be useful for me cuz idk much about it, but for FI people it probably wouldnt be helpful, cuz they already discussed with socialists alot, and know what their arguments and responses are.

>And you don't seem to know much about Blizzard or to have read the reddit response very thoroughly.

i have not read the reddit responses at all, i just looked at the titles of like 3 threads, and they seemed to be mostly just complaining so i didnt look into it more. i assume i should have, so that i would know what other peoples thoughts were that i could try to criticize?

i think that if something similar to this happens in the future i should still write about it instead of not write about it, until i can be sure that it would be a waste of time/not useful to write about it.

so if there is something that would be good to write about, i still write about it, even if i think it might be a waste of time, cuz i cant tell for sure if its a waste of time yet.

i dont take criticism well. i think criticism is important, and that its a good thing when someone else criticizes you, cuz its helpful for you if your wrong ideas are corrected, but i still get embarrassed about it in general. i read curis 2 articles on emotions ("Emotions" in Fallible Articles, on fallibleideas.com, and "Bounded and Unbounded Emotions" on rationalessays.com) like 6 months ago, but i havnt re-read them yet, i probably will after i send this message.

the articles have helped me some, cuz i can think "what is this emotion trying to do for me?" and i find that helpful, but thats basically been my entire takeaway from those 2 articles that i remember, cuz i havnt reread them, and when i did read them, i didnt really think about them, and how they apply to stuff.

is there more stuff other than those 2 emotions articles to help me with criticism? or do i have to get better in general to be able to take criticism in a good way?

i feel like this comment might be to long. im worried people wont read it cuz of that

#11466 Having cheap stuff on the menu wouldn't bring equality. The rich guy would have a bigger menu to choose from. The restaurant would be better serving him by giving him more variety and options. Similarly the rich guy could come back more times without it getting repetitive.

Even a menu of only cheap stuff discriminates because the rich guy can get larger quantities – e.g. 500 orders of something, to go, to feed his party guests. There are things he can get with his money that the restaurant won't do for a poor guy who won't pay that much.

> i feel like this comment might be to long. im worried people wont read it cuz of that

People here are good at reading.

> i have not read the reddit responses at all, i just looked at the titles of like 3 threads, and they seemed to be mostly just complaining so i didnt look into it more.

Complaints are criticisms. The threads pointed out many criticisms of Blizzard.

> is there more stuff other than those 2 emotions articles to help me with criticism? or do i have to get better in general to be able to take criticism in a good way?

People make *mistakes*. We're fallible. Mistakes are common. Making things better involves *finding* and *fixing* mistakes. Criticisms are attempts to point out mistakes – to help find them. (They also sometimes contain ideas about how to fix it.) Disliking criticism is like shooting the messenger for telling you about a problem that he didn't cause.

This is complicated by people being jerks. So lots of people's experience with criticism involves someone who was trying to be mean, to lower your social status, to hurt your feelings, that kinda thing. Often those mean comments don't try to explain or argue, they aren't intellectually substantive. Disliking people being mean is fine, and should be separated from disliking pointing out possible mistakes.

the first star wars film was massively changed from the first cut. this video explains how, with some behinds-the-scenes details that are interesting (just generally interesting but especially if you are a star wars fan. i thought the bit about how a core premise of the entire finale was essentially added on in editing especially interesting):

> Hitler and his entourage were health fanatics obsessed with cleanliness and with killing “bugs,” the latter category including unwanted people, especially Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and mental patients. Hitler neither drank nor smoked and was a vegetarian. Preoccupied with the fear of illness and the welfare of animals, he could not “tolerate the idea of animals’ being killed for human consumption” (Proctor 1999, 136). After Hitler became chancellor, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments.” The medical mass murder of mental patients went hand in hand with the prohibition of vivisection, which was declared a capital offense (129; see also Borkin [1978] 1997, 58). The fact that the Nazi public-health ethic demanded not only respect for the health of the greatest numbers (of Aryans) but also for the health of animals (except “bugs”) illustrates the connections between the love of pharmacracy and animal rights, on one hand, and the loathing of human rights and the lives of imperfect persons, on the other hand. (The work of bioethicist Peter Singer (1994) also illustrates these connections; see also “Dangerous Words” 2000 and Szasz 1999, 89, 96–97.)

> Globalists and lslamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed. Atomization of society must also occur at the individual level; with attacks directed against all levels of group and personal identity. Hence the sexism, racism and xenophobia memes. As a Judea-Christian culture, forced inclusion of post-modern notions of tolerance is designed to induce nihilistic contradictions that reduce all thought, all faith, all loyalties to meaninglessness. Group rights based on sex or ethnicity are a direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed. "Transgender acceptance" memes attack at the most basic level by denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one's sex. When a population has 2 + 2 = 5 imposed on it, there are many that benefit…

> The seven-page document, which eventually landed on the president’s desk, precipitated a crisis that led to the departure of several high-level NSC officials tied to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The author of the memo, Rich Higgins, who was in the strategic planning office at the NSC, was among those recently pushed out.

> The Stormlight series has a very odd structure. Each novel is outlined as a trilogy plus a short story collection (the interludes) and is the length of four regular books. This lets me play with narrative in some interesting ways—but it also makes each volume a beast to write.

In tons of cases, the Golden Rule works badly because people have different preferences than you do. If you treat them according to your own preferences, you'll often violates theirs. E.g. I like being served sushi dinners, but many other people don't because they are vegetarians or dislike fish or whatever, so I shouldn't serve them sushi dinners even though I like being treated that way.

It seems mostly meant as an argument against theft, murder, and other really bad stuff that basically no one prefers. Thinking about what it'd be like to be stolen from, before stealing, is a good idea. But it's not the primary issue. It doesn't explain what property or peace are, or why they matter, or how they connect to reason, or why reason matters, etc. For some info on those things see https://freeliberalism.com/liberalism

FYI this question would have been better if it included some information about why you were asking this. Why did you bring up the Golden Rule instead of something else? What stood out to you about it as good or bad?

> “This president has instituted punishing sanctions against Moscow for its military aggression and has taken direct action against Russia on several fronts. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and imposed harsh and effective sanctions against Tehran, and he has endorsed the aspirations of self-government for the Iranian people. He has supported the Saudi monarchy’s battle against Wahhabi forces both domestically and abroad. He has stood with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi against the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. The only legitimate grievance Stephens has in the aforementioned paragraph is President Trump’s friendliness with the regime in Ankara, which supports the Muslim Brotherhood. But on every other issue, Stephens is misleading his audience and/or incorrectly identifying President Trump’s foreign policy.”

> People want to do great impressive big things, things that matter. They don't want to be a child doing little things. They want to think that they are already educated to do things in the world. This is what adults think. But if they would invest in getting the basics right they would have a ??? of being highly effective later on in the future."

I don't like how this gives an FH quote and attributes it to FNI. You can't tell what book it's actually from, based on the page, if you don't already know. Should quote the original source or mention both sources.

The speakers on the iPhone X are quite remarkable. Clear, LOUD, very enjoyable to listen to. Stereo makes a big difference.

I remember when Apple switched away from 30 pin and people were complaining about forced obsolescence (despite Apple using that connector for like a decade). Freeing up that space on the bottom of the device has let Apple do great things :D

IIRC, ET wrote a blog post once that was about this phenomenon where once someone named an issue, it was as if the flood gates opened up. Now, the pressure had diminished and the other ppl there were interested in talking about the issue now. Does anyone remember? Can you find it? Thanks

#11530 I forget. I think lots of it is due to passivity and herd-following. Also with any kind of leadership, including bringing up an issue, you could be wrong and get criticized, so there's that kind of risk (which some might see as an upside, not a downside, but most people aren't like that). Also lots of people didn't think of the issue until someone else said it, and they hide that.

Anyway I'm posting because the term "libertarian" is so fucked up that people hostile to good, capitalist economists are exemplars of the term!? What meaning does libertarian have left if being clueful about capitalist economists isn't part of it? He's openly saying not to associate him with the best capitalist economists, particular Mises. BTW he's also flamed Ayn Rand. If you don't like Mises *or* Rand, what sort of capitalism do you like!?

Charles Tew said in his most recent video (FP Podcast #88) that people who are attracted to a certain sex can’t be friends with that sex cuz “if you like a member of the sex you are romantically attracted to enough to be friends then you will develop feelings for that person. And then you will be in a situation in which you can manifest those feelings more fully, and they are requited, in which case you will become more than friends, or you will be in a situation in which it is not possible to manifest those feelings, or they are un-requited, in which case being friends is a bad idea and will be a painful, unpleasant experience.

Now this principle doesn't apply in the context of people that you wouldn't be in a romantic relationship with, for what ever reason, the most obvious reason here would be an age difference. But within the context of people with whom you could conceivably be in a romantic relation ship, i don't believe in friend ships. I'm not saying you cant be acquaintances, or have a professional relationship, or be polite to this person or never cross paths with her, but, when i talk about friendship I'm talking about 'hanging out', 'hanging out' with a member of the opposite sex with whom you could be in a relationship but for the fact that one of you isn't into it, or is already taken by someone else, is a bad idea, and i disapprove of it. so dont be friends with girls."

he talks about it as a part of a response to a question, question starts at 3:20, his answer ends at 7:08

That seemed dumb cuz you can be friends with someone on text even if you can’t see or hear them, so why not in person? maybe that doesnt count as "hanging out" but hanging out seems really vague, does that mean you cant play online video games with girls? would that count as hanging out?

He's lying about the bot. He wrote the script himself. He'd say it's a joke, but it will confuse many people who don't have a good grasp on the capabilities of bots/"AI"/"computer learning"/etc. It could also confuse lots of programmers who aren't familiar with GDQ culture. Also lots of people aren't good at recognizing how much people lie and being able to make a confident judgment that something is a lie.

I think it's bad to post confusing falsehoods. That there are 3 major skills involved in recognizing its false, all of which are uncommon, makes it considerably worse.

> "In 2017, the President of the United States will be someone who has very clearly and forcefully stated to the world that the Iraq War was a mistake.

> He will also make it a major priority to renegotiate NAFTA and other trade deals to get a better deal for American workers. He will repeatedly exclaim that, when it comes to trade, corporate profits should come second to securing good jobs for American workers. Not free trade, fair trade!, he'll say.

> On the first day of his presidency, he will make it a priority to meet with several organized labor leaders in the White House; they will leave the meeting thrilled and state that they truly believe he is on their side and that he wants to do whatever he can to help create jobs and improve wages for American workers. He will make it a favorite pastime to call up fat-cat CEOs and yell at them about how they need to stop outsourcing jobs and need to invest in American labor OR ELSE."

> "That's amazing," you'd say. I might reply: "well, you know, some people think that is a little tyrannical and autocratic trying to bully people like --" "Oh please," you'd cut me off, "I think those CEOs can take it. It's amazing to hear we'll finally have someone showing a little bit of back bone for labor against capital in this country! Anyway, this guy sounds amazing. Tell me more. What does he think about health care?"

> I'd continue: "Well, when it comes to health care, he will come out in favor of negotiating against drug companies for lower prices on prescription drugs. And he will say that, whatever we do on health care reform, we need to make sure that we guarantee coverage for people with preexisting conditions.

> He will be forcefully in favor of preserving social security and medicare. He will call for six weeks of guaranteed maternity leave.

> Also, I should note, he is in favor of large-scale government spending on massive projects to put Americans to work rebuilding our national infrastructure.

> He will also come out in favor of reform to close the carried interest tax loophole.

> Also, he won't seem very religious all. Not only will he be for civil unions, he will in fact openly admit that he has no problem with gay marriage. He will even wave around a rainbow LGBT flag at one of his rallies."

> At this point, you would probably stop me. "Stop, stop. I don't believe you," you'd say, "It's too good to be true."

> In your head you are picturing some heroic left-wing dream candidate.

> "Well, there is more," I'd say. "You really should know that he wants to build a wall on our border with Mexico to prevent further illegal immigration and, although he has suggested that after the wall is built he may be open to some limited amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, he does not support blanket amnesty for all 11 million+ illegal immigrants in the country. He dismisses all arguments about illegal immigration ultimately benefiting GDP, because he believes the most important thing to focus on is the well-being of low-wage American workers."

> "Uh ok," I'd say, "well you should also know that he is going to make some very strong statements about the need for law and order and say that he wants to crack down hard on crime."

> Again, you might ask for specifics. But, at the end of the day, you'd probably say something like: "don't all politicians talk that way these days? I mean Bill Clinton sure did. I think we can stomach another Clinton/Biden crime bill. This doesn't seem so bad, especially when weighed against all of that great stuff you were talking about earlier. Tell me more about how he wants to renegotiate NAFTA...."

> "Well, I'm not sure you understand," I'd say. "He is going to say some pretty controversial stuff on race and the inner cities that people are really not going to like."

> "Like what?" you'd ask.

> "Well," I'd say, "one particularly controversial statement that will rile a lot of people up is: '[The] inner cities of our country . . . are a disaster education-wise, job-wise, safety-wise, in every way possible [and] I�m going to help the African-Americans. I�m going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities.'"

> "Bravo!" you'd say. "I'm glad we will finally have someone willing to speak honestly about the inner cities and the terrible conditions so many people, racial minorities especially, are living in. If conservatives find that controversial, then that's their problem. I'm tired of Bush ignoring our inner cities. This guy sounds great!"

> At this point, I'd realize you weren't quite getting it. I could try reading out some particular awkward Trump quotes, but I'd probably realize I'm not going to convince you that your left-wing hero of 2017 is a racist on the basis of quotes like that. If "you cannot go to a 7 -Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent" or "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean" doesn't do it for Joe Biden, the taco bowl tweet probably won't do it here. So I switch gears.

> "Well," I'd reply, "there's more you need to know." "He is going to come into office on the heels of some terror attacks in Europe and the U.S. by islamic extremists. Don't worry, nothing as bad as 9/11, but still pretty bad. Because many of the people involved in these attacks came from overseas, he is going to institute a temporary ban on immigration from 7 middle eastern countries until the government can establish better vetting procedures for new visitors and immigrants."

> You'd probably reply with something like: "Well, I'll have to see what those new vetting procedures actually are. But after Bush, I'll just be glad if he doesn't invade all seven! Anyway, tell me more about this guy...."

> At this point I'd have to start reeling off things like lowering the corporate tax rate, an ed secretary who believes in charter schools, cutting back on administrative regulations in certain areas, seeking to balance the budget in view of our $19 trillion national debt.

> You'd probably say something like: "Well then, I guess we won't have cured the democratic party of Clintonism altogether by 2017, but....... wait? Did you say $19 trillion? Our national debt is really going to more than double between now and 2017?"

> "Yes, it's going to get pretty deep," I'd reply.

> "Hmm. Well that's what we get for all these dumb wars in the middle east," you'd say. "I guess our president in 2017 will be left to try and clean that up."

> "There's more," I'd say. "He is going to have a pretty sordid history when it comes to women. There will be a couple accusers who say he sexually harassed them. Nothing definitive, but a lot of allegations. There will be a tape where he's caught, about 10 years before running for president, saying he has 'grabbed women by the pussy.'"

> (Long sigh) "Well then I guess we realllly won't have rid the Democratic party of clintonism entirely" (chuckle). "But it does sound like he will be pretty good for women on policy. Tell me more about that six weeks of maternity leave. Sounds very progressive...."

> "Oh shit, there's one big thing I forgot to tell you. He's pro-life. Or at least he says he's pro-life now. He had said he was pro-choice in the past, though. Some people think he just plays the pro-life role now because he needed it to get elected."

> This you would probably be very taken aback by. "I don't believe it," you'd say. "Are you sure? He's so progressive on all of those other issues.... we've progressed so much that we can elect a guy like this, but he still needed to play the pro-life card to get elected? Even as a democrat? How did we go backward on that one?"

> "Well," I'd say "he'd been a democrat previously, but actually ran for president as a Republican.

> That would probably blow your mind. "You're telling me this guy is a Republican? I mean, jesus, I'm going to disagree with him on abortion and the corporate tax stuff but, oh wow.... it seems too good to be true that we're really going to progress so much between now and 2017 that this is what our REPUBLICANS will look like? I mean, wow, from George W. Bush to this guy? I mean, it sounds like we are really going to have a lot of common ground to work from. I could certainly work with a Republican like that. You are sure he's a Republican right? Really? OK, wow."

> At that point, I would have to ask: "would it surprise you to learn that you are literally going to cry openly in the street while waving around a sign comparing this guy to Hitler?"

The "intellectual and cultural elites" of our culture are all a big fraud. They are part of a propaganda campaign to use authority and social status to tell people what to think. And what do they preach? Statism. As their government masters intended.

ninja, the most popular twitch streamer, was at risk of not getting 1st place at a not very importnat competition

his fans falsely reported his competitor’s instagram and got him a strike and his posts are muted/censored and shit

that kinda harrassment shit isn’t just politics. any kinda popular group can harass other groups now

with zero evidnece/reason

like he posted he might get to 100,000 kills b4 ninja and screenshot of his in game kill count

and somehow the trolls reporting him succeed and instagram actions him

ninja did not encourage or suggest this type of thing. he didn't hint at liking it or anything. all he did is pay attention to the competition, talk about it, try to win. he probably needs to specifically tell his fans to stop, but i doubt that'll make a ton of difference.

> A *rambling, faceless, voice-distorted, mindlessly upward-inflecting* video like this makes you sound *like, like*, an *airhead moronnial* who, *like*, says *"like" without reason*. It makes you sound *like, like*, the very *aliens* who have, *like*, taken over the ARI.

>

> This does *not, like, help* the case against Obleftivism.

Insults highlighted. High density! And I just highlighted the insult words, not setup like “makes you sound”. Including setup and supporting words, it would have just been all in italics because Lindsay Perigo had nothing to say other than insults.

> I can't comment about the content because I was so distracted by the presentation and spent no more than 5 minutes on it. This is not being "mean and unintellectual"; it's a judicious and honest use of my time.

> John Galt would never have, like, spoken in the manner of a contemporary, like, moronnial.

Rand, who spoke with a Russian accent, had some things to say about charismatic speakers (emphasis added):

> He sang “Sweet Adeline” at the top of his *town crier’s voice*.

> In high school Ellsworth became a local celebrity—the star orator. For years the school did not refer to a promising boy as a good speaker, but as “a Toohey.” He won every contest. Afterward, members of the audience spoke about “that beautiful boy”; they did not remember the sorry little figure with the sunken chest, inadequate legs and glasses; *they remembered the voice*. He won every debate.

> He brought his audience to tears in one of his greatest *oratorical triumphs* with the theme of “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

> It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the *voice of a giant*.

>

> Keating stood, his mouth open. *He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything, he would be led blindly anywhere.*

> Former radio and television announcer Lindsay Perigo's Premium Spoken English course is designed to restore well-spokenness to our social interaction.

​

> How we look and how we sound are two essential components of how we humans communicate. While millennials in particular are scrupulous as to the first—conscientiously attending gym, pounding pavements and counting calories—they have often neglected the second. Premium Spoken English (PSE) corrects the imbalance, recognising that the ability to speak in a clear and coherent manner is an invaluable asset for personal development, an indispensable tool in the cultivation of leadership and social skills, and an integral part of the pursuit of excellence.

​

> Perigo's course is not "elocution" intended to make people sound "plummy." Students are taught to speak with a well-modulated tone and clear articulation. Graduates derive an edge from the fact that educated-sounding speech conveys more authority, even if only subliminally, than uneducated. Well-spoken people have a head-start when it comes to being persuasive, credible and influential.

>It’s also worth reading for its comparisons, with precise statistics, on life in Russia under the czars versus life after the Revolution. From 1876 to 1904 in Russia, 486 people were executed, including political actors – about 17 a year. From June 1918 to October 1919, more than 16,000 people were executed – about a thousand a month. In the years 1937 and 1938, half a million political prisoners were shot – about 20,000 a month. By contrast, the Spanish Inquisition, in the 80 years of its existence, saw an average of 10 heretics a month condemned to death.

alot of the times when i say "good luck" to someone, i pause and try to think of a phrase that means "i think you are able to put effort into doing what you are doing, and with skill and your own hard work, succeed" but theres nothing like that in a short phrase thats like "good luck", i wonder why. and if there is a phrase like that, plz tell me.

>So, everything The Verge opened with was straight up false. But it kept going, claiming falsely that Tim Cook's letter to investors "can be summed up as 'too many good phones already out there.'"

>False again, that's strike three. That's the opposite of the statements Apple has been broadcasting for some time now. And it's just not true at all, if you define truth as being supported by significant, observable facts.

>Apple has devoted significant time at its last few media events from WWDC to Brooklyn outlining that its installed base of satisfied users is not the fearsome negative that analysts keep depicting it as. Instead, Apple views this as entirely desirable and actually works to make sure that existing iPhones remain usable and in operation for as long as possible. It's been doing this via iOS upgrades that have long supported iPhones for four years or more in an industry that can't manage to deliver Android updates for even 18 months.

>Five years ago, the Verge balked at the high price of iPhone 5s and offered recommendations for rival phones that aren't even supported today

>Apple's articulation of its "planned anti-obsolescence" blew peoples' minds because it's completely opposed to the cynically-cliche idea that Apple is working to sabotage existing devices with fatty iOS releases and battery shenanigans that make older phones feel like they need to be replaced, just to sell more iPhones.

>If that's the case, why has Apple been supporting five-year-old iPhones with every iOS release? In fact, a major driver of iOS 12 involved work to make it more efficient on older iPhones.

>Apple isn't having problems selling new iPhones the way that GoPro ran into with its cameras--facing a relatively small addressable market that grew content with the one action camera they bought for quite a long time.

>If Apple had the GoPro problem, it wouldn't be able to be introducing ever more expensive new models! Apple has been selling over 200 million iPhones every year since 2015, even as its product portfolio has trended higher into more expensive models. That means Apple is regularly upgrading a large percentage of its installed base.

…

>For Apple, the more existing iPhones it can keep in active use, the larger the addressable market it can count on to buy upgrades each year. Counterintuitively, rather than making its older phones break early, Apple wants to keep them working, so that even refurbished trade-ins and hand-me-downs keep serving someone with a potential to upgrade to a new iPhone someday in the future.

>Existing iPhone users are far less likely to leave iOS because Apple keeps working to make its platform an attractive place to stay. Unlike Android, Apple is cultivating a rich ecosystem, not just the barest compatibility API for running shared software across the device outputs of various Chinese factories.

> Now, twenty-two years later, we address, once again, the question of the intellectual and the marketplace.

> This does not argue the futility of the question, however, but rather its central importance. In a sense, the Mont Pèlerin Society was founded to deal with the problem of the modern intellectual’s antipathy to capitalism and the harmful consequences of that antipathy. Most of us here have now lived long enough to understand the truth of Schumpeter’s assertion that “capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets.” The only thing that changes, Schumpeter wrote, are the particulars (1950: 144). That ever-changing indictment is presented, over and over again, by the intellectuals.

> In earlier times, they indicted capitalism for the immiseration of the proletariat, inevitable depressions, and the disappearance of the middle classes. Then, a little later, it was for imperialism and inevitable wars among the imperialist (capitalist) powers.

> In more recent decades, the indictment again changed, as earlier accusations became too obviously untenable.

> Capitalism was charged with being unable to compete with socialist societies in technological progress (Sputnik); with promoting automation, leading to catastrophic permanent unemployment; both with creating the consumer society and its piggish affluence and with proving incapable of extending such piggishness to the underclass; with “neo-colonialism”; with oppressing women and racial minorities; with spawning a meretricious popular culture; and with destroying the earth itself.5 As George Stigler remarked: “A constant stream of new criticism — such as the problem of homeless families — is being invented, discovered, or heavily advertised.”6 The question remains: what is at the root of this ever-changing, never-ending indictment? What accounts for the intellectuals’ unremitting hostility to the market economy?

> To throw light on these questions, we must go beyond the specific accusations themselves. Israel Kirzner writes (1992: 96):

>> Whatever the stated specific denunciations of capitalism, whatever the errors in economic analysis which are implicit in these denunciations, a thorough understanding of the anti-capitalist mentality cannot avoid ultimately coming to grips with the deep-seated prejudices and ingrained habits of thought which are, both consciously and unconsciously, responsible for the antipathy shown to the market system.

Capitalism needs it's checks and balances. If lobbying was weeded out of government then it would be a system that would work much better for everyone - not just the ultra rich.

That being said, some people (me and half the world) wouldn't have been able to start a business, in my case a fitness business, without being somewhat capitalistic. Entrepreneurial spirit drives innovation and purpose.

[URL removed by curi, I think this is a spam comment but it did say something about capitalism so I left the rest.]

It's so sad how DD has fallen so far. His thinking quality has gotten super unreliable. This tweet is dumb. People see that something is sabotaging error correction in a systematic way. There is, as DD says, some underlying thing, the "whatever is sabotaging error correction". So then what do people do? They *name it*. They call it something. What do they call it? A bias. And they try to figure out what type of bias it is, what its properties are, etc.

I disagree with a lots of ideas people have about what biases exist, how they function, what causes them, etc. No doubt DD does too. But that's just the specifics. The concept of bias – something causing systematic error – is fine and it's usually way better to use the standard term than call it a "whatever".

Steven Pinker got his status via competition with other intellectuals. What was the nature of the competition? Did they compete to have the best ideas, or to impress ppl better? In other words, is the public open to manipulation and if so is manipulation more effective than having a good idea? ez question…

Steven Pinker outcompeted other intellectuals at sounding smart to second-handed ppl and pulling their puppet strings. His high status position is an indication he's one of the worst and most corrupt intellectuals, not one of the better ones.

Ayn Rand "...if we wanted to save the world from communism its not necessary to go to war, all would one have to do is stop helping them economically, stop building bridges to them which have supported them for 50 years now. that country will collapse of its own evil if the semi free world did not constantly help them" from "Ayn Rand's First Appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 1967" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBmViYDlrjU at 20:03. are there examples of free countries helping communist countries? i have not heard of communist countries being helped before, execpt for the USSR being helped during ww2 to fight the axis

#11678 the media just lies about stuff after the fact so getting stuff wrong isn't a big problem for them. six months from now the "Smirking White MAGA Teens incident" will be part of the Narrative forever

How many "depressed" people would stop being "depressed" if you gave them a billion dollars? But surely money isn't a treatment (nor are the mansions, caviar, parties and fancy cars they buy with it treatments) – and therefore they never had a real illness since it went away any cure. They just didn't like their life and when their life situation changed they were happier.

> At Metro's headquarters in downtown Washington, the lights pop on at 5:30 every weekday morning. Hours before the masses arrive for work, the building glows like a silent, hulking eight-story spaceship.

> Every evening, most employees go home at 5, but the lights stay on for three more hours, bright enough that passersby can see the artwork in individual offices. No "Starry Night," apparently.

> The electric bill was $1,775,194.96 last year: nearly $1,400 per employee.

> Workers worried about global warming -- or Metro's budget deficit -- might be inclined to turn the lights off when they're not needed, but they can't. Metro offices have no individual switches.

> Used to be, the lights were on all the time. About two decades ago, Metro installed a computer system to control them, which was considered energy-efficient at that time, officials said.

> Needless to say, no one thinks that anymore.

> "That wouldn't be efficient. That's obvious," said Jeff Niesz, business development director for Pepco Energy Services, which Metro has hired to reduce energy costs.

> It turned out that the “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression” had made a video, almost two hours in length, and while it does not fully exonerate the boys, it releases them from most of the serious charges.

> The full video reveals that there was indeed a Native American gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, that it took place shortly before the events of the viral video, and that during it the indigenous people had been the subject of a hideous tirade of racist insults and fantasies. But the white students weren’t the people hurling this garbage at them—the young “African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” were doing it. For they were Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny sect of people who believe they are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and whose beliefs on a variety of social issues make Mike Pence look like Ram Dass.

> The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.

> It seems that the Black Hebrew Israelites had come to the Lincoln Memorial with the express intention of verbally confronting the Native Americans, some of whom had already begun to gather as the video begins, many of them in Native dress. The Black Hebrew Israelites’ leader begins shouting at them: “Before you started worshipping totem poles, you was worshipping the true and living God. Before you became an idol worshipper, you was worshipping the true and living God. This is the reason why this land was taken away from you! Because you worship everything except the most high. You worship every creation except the Creator—and that’s what we are here to tell you to do.”

> A young man in Native dress approaches them and gestures toward the group gathering for its event. But the Black Hebrew Israelites mix things up by throwing some dead-white-male jargon at him—they are there because of “freedom of the speech ” and “freedom of religion” and all that. The young man backs away. “You have to come away from your religious philosophy,” one Black Hebrew Israelite yells after him.

> A few more people in Native costume gather, clearly stunned by his tirade. “You’re not supposed to worship eagles, buffalos, rams, all types of animals,” he calls out to them.

> A Native woman approaches the group and begins to challenge its ideology, which prompts the pastor’s coreligionists to thumb their Bibles for relevant passages from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He asks the woman why she’s angry, and when she tells him that she’s isn’t angry, he responds, “You’re not angry? You’re not angry? I’m making you angry.” The two start yelling at each other, and the speaker calls out to his associates for Isaiah 58:1.

> Another woman comes up to him yelling, “The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit.”

> Black Hebrew Israelites believe, among other things, that they are indigenous people. The preacher tells a woman that “you’re not an Indian. Indian means ‘savage.’ ”

> Men begin to gather with concerned looks on their face. “Indian does not mean ‘savage,’ ” one of them says reasonably. “I don’t know where you got that from.” At this point, most of the Native Americans who have surrounded—“mobbed”?—the preacher have realized what the boys will prove too young and too unsophisticated to understand: that the “four young African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” are the kind of people you sometimes encounter in big cities, and the best thing to do is steer a wide berth. Most of them leave, exchanging amused glances at one another. But one of the women stays put, and she begins making excellent points, some of which stump the Black Hebrew Israelites.

> It was heating up to be an intersectional showdown for the ages, with the Black Hebrew Israelites going head to head with the Native Americans. But when the Native woman talks about the importance of peace, the preacher finally locates a unifying theme, one more powerful than anything to be found in Proverbs, Isaiah, or Ecclesiastes.

> He tells her there won’t be any food stamps coming to reservations or the projects because of the shutdown, and then gesturing to his left, he says, “It’s because of these … bastards over there, wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.”

> The camera turns to capture five white teenage boys, one of whom is wearing a maga hat. They are standing at a respectful distance, with their hands in their pockets, listening to this exchange with expressions of curiosity. They are there to meet their bus home.

> “Why you not angry at them?” the Black Hebrew Israelite asks the Native American woman angrily.

> The boys don’t respond to this provocation, although one of them smiles at being called a corny-ass Billy Bob. They seem interested in what is going on, in the way that it’s interesting to listen to Hyde Park speakers.

> The Native woman isn’t interested in attacking the white boys. She keeps up her argument with the Black Hebrew Israelites, and her line of reasoning is so powerful that it throws the preacher off track.

> “She trying to be distracting,” one of the men says. “She trying to stop the flow.”

> By now the gathering of Covington Catholic boys watching the scene has grown to 10 or 12, some of them in maga hats. They are about 15 feet away, and while the conflict is surely beyond their range of experience, it also includes biblical explication, something with which they are familiar.

> “Don’t stand to the side and mock,” the speaker orders the boys, who do not appear to be mocking him. “Bring y’all cracker ass up here and make a statement.” The boys turn away and begin walking back to the larger group.

> “You little dirty-ass crackers. Your day coming. Your day coming … ’cause your little dusty asses wouldn’t walk down a street in a black neighborhood, and go walk up on nobody playing no games like that,” he calls after them, but they take no notice. “Yeah, ’cause I will stick my foot in your little ass.”

> By now the Native American ceremony has begun, and the attendees have linked arms and begun dancing. “They just don’t know who they are,” one of the Black Hebrew Israelites says remorsefully to another. Earlier he had called them “Uncle Tomahawks.”

> The boys have given up on him. They have joined the larger group, and together they all begin doing some school-spirit cheers; they hum the stadium-staple opening bars of “Seven Nation Army” and jump up and down, dancing to it. Later they would say that their chaperones had allowed them to sing school-spirit songs instead of engaging with the slurs hurled by the Black Hebrew Israelites.

> And then you hear the sound of drumming, and Phillips appears with several other drummers, all of them headed to the large group of boys. “Here come Gad!” says the Black Hebrew Israelite excitedly. His religion teaches that Native Americans are one of the 12 tribes of Israel, Gad. Apparently he thinks that his relentless attack on the Native Americans has led some of them to confront the white people. “Here come Gad!” he says again, but he is soon disappointed. “Gad not playing! He came to the rescue!” he says in disgust.

> The drummers head to the boys, and keep playing. The boys, who had been jumping to “Seven Nation Army,” start jumping in time to the drumming. Phillips takes a step toward the group, and then—as it parts to admit him—he walks into it. Here the Black Hebrew Israelites’ footage is of no help, as Phillips has moved into the crowd.

> Now we may look at the viral video—or, as a CNN chyron called it, the “heartbreaking viral video”—as well as the many others that have since emerged, none of which has so far revealed the boys to be chanting anything about a wall or about making America great again. Phillips keeps walking into the group, they make room for him, and then—the smiling boy. One of the videos shows him doing something unusual. At one point he turns away from Phillips, stops smiling, and locks eyes with another kid, shaking his head, seeming to say the word no. This is consistent with the long, harrowing statement that the smiling boy would release at the end of the weekend, in which he offered an explanation for his actions that is consistent with the video footage that has so far emerged, and revealed what happened to him in the 48 hours after Americans set to work doxing him and threatening his family with violence. As of this writing, it seems that the smiling boy, Nick Sandmann, is the one person who tried to be respectful of Phillips and who encouraged the other boys to do the same. And for this, he has been by far the most harshly treated of any of the people involved in the afternoon’s mess at the Lincoln Memorial.

>“Russell Means was attracting a lot of support at the state LP conventions. I was horrified and assumed that this was a result of a lack of knowledge regarding his history. I researched the subject and released a booklet entitled Do the Ends Justify Means? The booklet caused an immediate reaction. Some of Ron Paul's top supporters contacted me and asked for more booklets. In the meantime I had expanded it greatly with more and more evidence. Everything was footnoted and documented. Hundreds of copies were purchased by Ron's supporters and distributed at state conventions. Up until the release of the booklet, Ron and Russell were running neck to neck. After the release of the booklet Ron started gaining most of the delegate support.

>Means countercharged that I had misquoted an article of his which appeared in the quasi-Marxist Mother Jones magazine entitled "For the World to Live the West Must Die." Mother Jones magazine, by coincidence, was just a few blocks from my bookstore in San Francisco. I went to them and got permission to reprint the article exactly as written. This was then distributed to all the Seattle delegates along with a short note saying: "Russell Means contends I have misquoted him. Here is the entire article as it appeared. Judge for yourself." Every delegate got a copy and Russell lost the nomination in a landslide.”

>“Rothbard's paper discussed how religious beliefs effect political beliefs. And while I would agree with him in general, his specific examples were filled with errors. It was quite clear that he had no concept how the various religious groups differed with each other. While over the years I had become disillusioned with Rothbard, having seen him in action making accusations and constantly splitting the party, this paper was almost a Damascus Road experience for me. I had, up until, this time respected his scholarship while becoming highly critical of his political strategies. Now as I read about a subject on which I was very informed it dawned on me that his scholarship wasn't that hot either. This fact has been confirmed to be by specialists in many different fields. The Rothbard fraud was built on the fact that people who knew he was wrong in one field simply assumed he was right in all the other fields which they didn't know. Thus legal experts accepted his views of history while historians didn't but were willing to trust him when it came to legal theory.”

> “Whites are to own up to the fact that regardless of their intentions, beliefs, behaviors or status in life, they are elite participants in a racist system that oppresses “people of color,” and are so merely because they are white.

> But discrimination on the basis of skin color has been outlawed in this country for more than 60 years. One might reasonably ask, “WTF is white privilege”?

> Here’s my politically incorrect answer: White privilege is the gift of being the only racial/ethnic group on the planet which it is okay to single out for abuse.

> Indeed, such abuse is obligatory for all who regard themselves as “woke,” and who aspire to promote “social justice.”

> This is a category that includes the media, the popular culture, the educational system, and such shapers of public opinion as Don Lemon; Joy Ann Reid; Joy Behar; Brian Stelter; Rachel Maddow; the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times and the Washington Post; and the Democratic Party.”

> “Major media sources including Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal previously spent much of last year promoting the idea that iPhone X was too expensive, an idea that was empirically proven to be false by real-world data. And yet today they are again boldly repeating the same false information about the latest batch of iPhones.

> This time, they are taking care to contradict their own narratives with meek observations of reality, so that their attention-getting sensationalist headlines are hedged by later paragraphs of sheepish acknowledgments that effectively admit that the entire premise of their articles is just tabloid-esque filler. We know why: these articles aren't trying to establish a pattern of accurate, reliable reporting; they're merely fluff content blown out to induce outrage in order to drive the social media engagement that supports their surveillance advertising clickbait revenue model.”

> #11714 Where did you get that quote? Where can I read more of the context?

HB sends stuff out to former members. This email had the subject line: "Monthly Enticement: Dealing with objections with limited time" and is from jan 24 or 25 depending on time zone. Here's a copy/paste of the html email, with some formatting lost but the blockquoting added back in:

---

Re: Ian McClure’s post 25137 of 1/10/19

Mr. McClure sent me this question in a private email, and I asked him to post it, so I could post my answer. While I agree with Jim Allard’s and Adam Reed’s replies on this topic, I want to clarify what evasion is.

> The topic was whether it’s a form of evasion to ignore objections to an Objectivist position or argument when you can reasonably surmise that they will not work out, even though you don’t have an actual refutation at that time. One example that came up was if someone claimed that lower taxes don’t work and backed that up with a citation.

>Our conclusion was that the criterion to use is coherence with the rest of our knowledge. . . . Do you think this is right?

No, the answer to the objection goes much deeper. Evasion is the unjustified ejection of material from conscious awareness. One tells oneself that the nascent thought is either false or unreal or unimportant, when one knows or senses that this isn’t true,. Evasion is a form of lying to oneself.

On the other hand, deciding consciously and honestly not to pursue a line of thought is not evasion, even if that decision is mistaken. The issue is: is the judgment conscious? If one consciously thinks, “I’m not going to think about this for the following reason . . .” that’s not evasion–even if that decision is mistaken. Evasion is slamming your mind shut. Consciously prioritizing one’s mental efforts is not that; it is in fact a virtue.

If one decides consciously and honestly not to spend time on the objection, one remains open to thinking about it on a future occasion, should it arise. But to evade it is to close the book on it (without a good reason).

Now in naming a reason to not spend time on an objection, it is possible to rationalize. One might think, “I can’t waste time fighting off everything that anyone throws at me.” That’s a rationalization–a straw man. But rationalization is an automatic process. That is, one’s subconscious feeds one the rationalization, and that’s not culpable because not volitional.

But how you deal with the rationalization is volitional. You can be aware that a rationalization “doesn’t sit right” with you. But the main thing is that a rational, non-evading person is willing to look at anything—he’s not permanently refusing to face anything—even whether a thought he accepted was in fact a rationalization. He is fine with: “Yeah, last week I said to myself ‘X’ and I went with that, but looking back, ‘X’ doesn’t make sense.”

Evasion, in summary, is the denial of the reality of something you know or sense is real. The rational policy does not concern the particular path you take, mentally, but that you are aware of the path you take, of your reason for taking it, and of the possibility of other paths being taken.

NOW, on the concrete about taxes. The objection is right and you guys are wrong. Had you pursued it, looking at both “sides,” you probably could have found the reason. (The reason is that spending—not any particular means of extracting the funds for it—is what matters.)

And that exemplifies why the best attitude is: if it isn’t a sophistical objection, there’s something positive to be learned in pursuing it, trying to put yourself in the objector’s shoes, and looking at the whole context.

There is a value to be gained, but that may or may not outweigh the costs in time and forgone other pursuits.

> I feel damn good being morally pure as possible and know how much of an amazing person I am for having literally no price that I would sell-out for.

Morality is practical, which this description neglects.

> Real life example: I could have legally stole 100k from a bank with no repercussions other than a burnt bridge and slightly hurt credit score, yet I did not.

Gifting 100k to a bank instead of using it to improve your life or your children's life is, in general, immoral. Morality is about making your own life better in a practical way, not about sacrificing yourself to help others. Banks are sophisticated counterparties which are responsible for the contracts they sign. Legally getting money from a bank is, in general, not stealing and not bad.

> It's legal in that I wouldn't have gone to jail. It's theft because the money isn't mine. I would have stolen it. Long story short, I know the vice president of a bank and he put my house on an unsecured note temporarily because we didn't have enough time to do it officially. I could have gotten the house for free but burned the bridge and hurt my credit score. It would have been technically legal, but immoral in my opinion. Do you still hold that it would have been moral and ethical to steal? Just because something is legal doesn't necessarily make it ethical and vice versa.

So...he is contractually obligated to pay the $100k. He wouldn't go to jail for not paying, but that would also be true if the note was secured by the house. The only difference is, instead of taking the house they would have to get a judgment and then collect against other assets or garnish his pay. The only way he'd get out of paying is by declaring bankruptcy and then *actually being bankrupt*.

Thinking he could "just take" an unsecured loan and not pay it back with the only consequence being a reduction in credit score is incredibly stupid on his part.

Legal means "permitted by law" (source: Google, and also i am a lawyer).

Imprisonment is a *punishment* for *certain* violations of the law. But there are all sorts of ways violations of the law get handled, from imprisonment to fines to money damages.

What you are describing with the note is a contractual situation. You are absolutely supposed to fulfill your contractual obligations under the law. Violating your contractual obligations is not accepted by the state's laws -- including the contract enforcement mechanism -- that you implicitly accept when you sign a contract.

When you agree to a contract, you are agreeing to accept the context in which that contract exists. This includes the enforcement mechanisms. Typically, the remedy for breach of contract is money damages. This can include stuff like wage garnishment or collection against other assets. These mechanisms involve the use of state force to seize your wealth due to your violation of the contract. This force is invoked against people -- and rightly so -- when they have violated the law.

more than almost anything, people innately crave an IDENTITY. this is why young people with no direction and few friends often turn to gangs, cults, and terrorist groups -- because they desperately want to BELONG to something.

people also deeply crave reassurance of their own SUPERIORITY and that they are DOING THE RIGHT THING with their lives.

in 2019 America, liberalism is a cult that reassures its members of their MORAL, INTELLECTUAL, and SOCIAL superiority.

and you can easily signal your membership to this ENLIGHTENED GROUP via SOCIAL MEDIA, where numerous others can virtue signal their own memberships to this ELITE CLUB and reassure each other of their SUPERIORITY.

members of this club do not deign to besmirch themselves by mingling with those of lesser status and opposing beliefs, lest they be judged for their company. additionally, they do not want to hear anything that may question the legitimacy of the thought processes they have fully adopted.

> “The judge did not in the slightest exonerate the rapist in this case. We “must not put responsibility on them [women] rather than the perpetrator,” she explicitly said. She merely made the sociological generalization that drunkenness made women more vulnerable to rapists (and no doubt other predators), and that they should therefore be cautious about being drunk in public.

> If the judge had said that women who were drunk were more vulnerable to robbery, it’s hard to imagine her being accused of implying lesser culpability on the part of the robber. She would probably have been taken to mean that a drunk woman was less able than a sober one to defend herself, or run away from a threat to her safety—that being drunk rendered her more likely to be picked upon by a potential robber. That would have struck people as so obvious as to not need saying.

> Everyone accepts that it is no excuse for a burglar that a house’s front door has been left open; moreover, a householder has a perfect right to leave his front door open if he so wishes. But equally no one would say that a householder who does not want to be burgled acts prudently if he insists upon exercising his perfect right (a much more perfect right than that to get drunk in public) to leave his front door open.

> Why, then, did the judge’s remarks cause such outrage? I think it was largely because outrage is so enjoyable, and therefore people are particularly prepared to be outraged. They are actually looking for pretexts to indulge in their favorite emotion.

> But why should outrage be such a pleasant emotion?

> Not only does it assure him who feels it that he is a good person, but—so long as it lasts, which can be for a long time—it answers, or at least buries, the deep existential questions of what life is for, and how it should be lived.”

> High School Students Disqualified From Debate After Quoting Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson

> A pair of Utah high school seniors lost a debate round because they read quotes from Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro and clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, who were deemed “white supremacists” by the judge.

> Layton High School senior Michael Moreno and his debate partner, whom The Daily Wire will not name, were participating in a round with a topic relating to immigration. The specific topic of the round was “Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on legal immigration.” Moreno and his partner were arguing in the negative, meaning they were arguing against the other team’s plan to reduce restrictions on legal immigration.

> Instead of arguing in the affirmative, Moreno told The Daily Wire, the other team read a “slam poem” about how terms like “legal” and “illegal” are dehumanizing. In documents provided to The Daily Wire, these students quoted from numerous professors critical of assimilation and the notion that immigrants must act American to live “the good life.”

> “Promises of citizenship and the ‘good life’ force non-normative subjects into a slow death, working towards the unbelievable goal of the American dream," the students said.

> Moreno and his partner responded by arguing the other team did not actually articulate a position. The structure of this debate allowed for the affirmative to propose a plan and then have the negative argue against that plan. Since the other team did not propose solutions to reduce restrictions on legal immigration, Moreno said, his team had nothing to argue against and claimed this was unfair.

> “We argue that this is bad for debate as it's unfair to us, that we came here as the negative to argue against substantially reducing restrictions on legal immigration, not their slam poem,” Moreno said.

> The other team, during the cross-examination section of the debate, said Moreno and his partner could not talk about fairness because they were “white males.” Moreno said he then speed-read through quotes from Shapiro and Peterson pertaining to identity politics. He specifically cited comments Shapiro made at the University of Connecticut on January 24, 2018, where he said: ‘Evil things are still evil even if I’m a white well-off religious man and good things are still good even if I’m a white well-off religious man …. My identity has nothing to do with what is right or wrong.”

> Moreno also quoted Peterson saying, “It goes along with this idea of class guilt; Because your group membership is the most important thing, if your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible – which of course every group has done – then you’re de facto responsible for that.”

> At this point, Moreno began recording the debate, and posted the video to YouTube with the faces of the other debaters blurred. The judge ended the round after Moreno’s quotes from Shapiro and Peterson, as the other team continued to affirm that they had no standing as “white males.”

> The judge, who before the round told each team not to be racist, claimed Moreno and his partner’s “evidence” and “saying things like ‘your identity doesn’t matter'” were actually racist. The judge then joined the opposing team in claiming it was Moreno and his partner who turned the debate into a discussion of “identity politics” and claimed Shapiro and Peterson are “racists.”

> After another 10 minutes of this kind of back and forth, the judge said Moreno and his partner lost the round.

> Moreno then spoke to the tournament directors, who both work for Arizona State University (The Daily Wire will not name them as they did not respond to a request for comment). These two affirmed that the team has a “legitimate gripe” over their treatment, but that Moreno and his partner were there to debate for that particular judge, and their arguments failed to persuade him, whether he was impartial or not.

> “I think you are totally right that [the judge] overstepped a little bit by stopping the debate and deciding, but I also think it’s incredibly obvious that – regardless of how many ways you try to couch this argument in front of that judge – the bar for the other team to respond to it was going to be so low that the argumentative content that you chose, the strategy that you chose, for that judge and for his stated philosophy, was a poor choice on your part,” one of the directors tells Moreno in the video.

> Neither of the directors responded to a Daily Wire inquiry about what is going on in the debate community that allows one side to just yell “racism” and end the debate.

> “The last straw for me was personal. I had written four reports on Nicaragua from 1983 to 1987 for the New Republic and other papers and reported on how within a few years of my first visit the country had taken a darker turn. After a trip to interview some of the thousands of refugees who had fled the country in Costa Rica and Honduras, I reported on the types of abuses of power taken against those citizens who differed with the revolutionary agenda. Later in 1987, I traveled through Central America, including Nicaragua, with the late New York City mayor Ed Koch , who had put together a small delegation of representative New Yorkers to assess the situation in the different countries.

> All of this activity made me a target of the democratic socialists. Howe was so upset about my trips and my writing about events in Nicaragua that he convened a small meeting of top editors from Dissent as well as some DSA leaders, who one by one condemned me for what I had written. The educator Deborah Meier was the angriest. "You may be right about what you say about the Sandinistas," she told me, "but while they are under attack by the American empire, we have a responsibility to extend our solidarity to them." The whole meeting appeared to me as a copy of the "criticism and self-criticism" sessions of the Chinese Communists during the Cultural Revolution. As Howe concluded the meeting, he told me, "We have agreed that you cannot write on Nicaragua in the pages of Dissent." My dissent, obviously, was too much for Dissent to bear!”

Unusually stupid comment from patio11 (the fact people aren't dying does not indicate that regulation is the cause. there are other plausible causes like the companies wanting to stay in business and also not wanting to be murderers. lots of dead passengers would put them out of business and would be morally unacceptable to most business leaders just like it is to most people in all positions in our society. there are incentives there other than regulation. surely most people and most companies care more other aspects of dead bodies besides regulatory headaches.)

Most crit rat's on twitter don't reply to or retweet ET. They're silently judging the source but not exposing their judgments to criticism. That's dishonest. And so lacking in guts. Esp. for a crit rat.

> Most crit rat's on twitter don't reply to or retweet ET. They're silently judging the source but not exposing their judgments to criticism. That's dishonest. And so lacking in guts. Esp. for a crit rat.

There is no info about the forum. What software does it use? What does it look like? How does moderation work? Absolutely zero info is available for prospective customers. There's no FAQ. It's very bad marketing material.

The only info about the forum is that unspecified guests will come do AMAs at unspecified times. AMAs are not discussion – you don't actually get to have a discussion with the guest.

The marketing page tells you the price of some of the things which are thrown in for free, but does *not* tell you the price of signing up for the forum. That is hidden and only visible within the actual signup process. The price is $10/month or $100/yr.

I presume JP will participate little or none on the discussion forum.

Is there a plan to make it a good forum? Any way to shape the culture or any smart design choices or whatever? No info is given. Presumably not.

So: looks really quite shitty and like a half-assed money grab. I do not plan to try it.

>At the same time they were meddling with the clocks, the French instituted a decimal calendar. This lasted a little longer, since it was forced by nature to make some concessions to real life. A year has 365 and a quarter days, give or take an hour, and that cannot be changed. What they did change was to make each month 30 days with the remaining five (or six) being extra days, not a part of any month.

>Even this would have likely survived, except that the revolutionaries also insisted that each month have three weeks of ten days each. There were two problems with that. Firstly, it destroyed the seven-day week that included a religious Sabbath day. Secondly, workers still only got one day off per week. These were both intentional, and the calendar was part of a plan to destroy religion and make workers more productive. The ten-day week fell out of favor immediately, and the whole calendar was abolished in 1805.

its interesting to see how the culture has changed and how it hasn't. Wikipedia entry on the old TV show The Honeymooners:

>Alice (née Alice Gibson), played in the first nine skits, starting in 1951, and ending in January 1952[9] by Pert Kelton, and by Audrey Meadows for all remaining episodes, is Ralph's patient but sharp-tongued wife of roughly 12 years. She often finds herself bearing the brunt of Ralph's insults, which she returns with biting sarcasm. She is levelheaded, in contrast to Ralph's pattern of inventing various schemes to enhance his wealth or his pride. In each case, she sees the current one's un-workability, but he becomes angry and ignores her advice (and by the end of the episode, her misgivings almost always are proven to have been well-founded). She has grown accustomed to his empty threats—such as "One of these days, POW!!! Right in the kisser!", "BANG, ZOOM!" or "You're going to the moon!"—to which she usually replies, "Ahhh, shaddap!" Alice studied to be a secretary before her marriage and works briefly in that capacity when Ralph is laid off. Wilma Flintstone is based on Alice Kramden.[8]

violent threats by a man to a woman -- regardless of being in the context of a loudmouth who never actually does anything violent -- would never fly now (as comedy, at least!). But marital fighting itself still totally okay.

> “The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than 'writing' a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related,” he writes, “Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

> Each memo is designed to be a full logical argument, complete with a reflexive defense of potential objections:

> Supporters say people could use the extra cash to cover unexpected emergencies, increase their savings and improve their *health*.

Emphasis added. Chicago wants to give people $1000/month for free at taxpayer expense. I think it's notable that *health* was used as a justification for this. Another example of the medicalization of everyday life and of moral issues.

>> Supporters say people could use the extra cash to cover unexpected emergencies, increase their savings and improve their *health*.

> Emphasis added. Chicago wants to give people $1000/month for free at taxpayer expense. I think it's notable that *health* was used as a justification for this. Another example of the medicalization of everyday life and of moral issues.

good call.

i think it's interesting that they want to give money to increase people's savings. they're really rejecting the old frame of means-testing to try to help only the "truly needy" or whatever. it's just a pure cash grab from the victim-taxpayers now. maybe some of the taxpayers would like to have more savings too? fuck them, i guess! :\

an overwatch caster just said “the ray of hope is gone” which is cliche. the co-caster said “it’s gone”. he played the role of an echo. taking what the other guy said and agreeing/amplifying is really really common and doesn’t add anything rationally, it’s just social stuff. and everyone does it with everyone. they all play the echo role a lot.

it reminds me of improv. i don't know much about improv but i know you're generally not supposed to contradict the other ppl doing the scene. whatever they make up, you go along with it and find a way to work with it, continue it, help it along. that's how people do conversations. that's standard social dynamics. it's fucking everywhere.

Seagull was an early, popular Overwatch streamer. he played pro, and was good, but chose to quit to stream more. he is streaming Apex Legends today, the new pubg/fortnite copy from EA that spent a lot of marketing dollars getting streamers/youtubers/internet-people to promote the game.

seagull is a smart person. at least he was. he talks like an idiot now. i watched him a little in the past and it was different. he changed to be more social as a streamer. (I remember Trump, the hearthstone streamer, actually trying to learn to be more socially normal while streaming, and getting tips from his viewers, and trying to please them and stuff. He was really nerdy in terms of his manner, and he's asian, so ppl thought he was smart and good at the game and overestimated his skill.)

seagull was playing smarter than his teammates but still pretty dumb. the game is slow paced, lots of waiting and not doing much, just like prior games in the genre. and it's a big FFA, aimed at being casual. it encourages ppl to play dumb.

seagull and his teammates kept complaining about luck, like whenever they died early game they blamed other ppl getting better weapons/armor drops. late game deaths were generally blamed on it being an FFA and there being multiple enemies from different directions. but they didn't try to recognize when they were outgunned and retreat to find more guns, they would just fight, die, and whine.

the stream provided tons of social interaction examples. they were chatting more than playing (i mean they were playing the whole time, but not actual combat, most of it was ez/slow/boring, just walking around and picking up gear and waiting for the play area to shrink.)

one interaction in particular went something like this. these are not exact words, just the ballpark:

guy: where do you live, seagull?

seagull: with my girlfriend.

some brief back and forth chat where the guy got more details. i think he asked if seagull had a house. seagull is moving soon but it's still just an apartment.

then referring to the first part of the conversation:

guy: it felt like you said "i live with my girlfriend, idiot"

["it felt like you said" wasn't said directly but i forget how he put it. "idiot" at the end of the sentence, after a comma, is an exact quote]

seagull: i'm sorry, i was just unsure what was going on, the question caught me off guard, so i just tried to answer it. i wasn't trying to be a jerk, you're awesome.

guy: i was trying to be a good friend and learn more about my buddy and get to know him more.

---

all this over a question and then a direct answer. why? what's the subtext?

it's like "i was super brave to ask you a question. i put myself on the line. what if it was a bad question? what if i looked dumb? i took a risk so we could get to know each other and you didn't support me. you just answered the question like it was a short, simple, easy question and you didn't reassure and encourage me. so now i don't really want to ask you a question ever again. i felt like an idiot that my question had a simple answer that i didn't know, and that you didn't give me a good excuse for not having already known the answer and needing to ask. asking questions shows weakness – that i didn't know the answer already – and you didn't do your part in making it ok, in softening that and praising me for the question and making things really friendly."

and seagull was apologetic about this, didn't disagree. and then the guy kept at it even after seagull already acknowledged the justice of the cause *and* did some reassuring and friendly fluff. the guy kept pushing and aggressively explained how he had been doing something friendly which is praiseworthy.

they're so immoral, anti-intellectual, and focussed on conformity to social norms.

btw a social rule i've observed is "never defend yourself". these ppl flame each other all the time and aggression is fine but contradicting ppl is not ok, and being hurt is not ok, so you can almost never defend yourself. all of the flames are half-serious and ambiguous – maybe it's a joke, maybe it's sarcastic, etc. that also prevents defending – if you get all serious mode about a joke ppl will just say you can't take a joke, will abandon that particular flame as something they didn't actually mean, and will think you're revealing that you can be hurt, and how, and that you wouldn't defend yourself unless you were actually hurt (and even then probably not, better to make a show of fake strength, so defending implies either being really bad at social interaction or being really hurt).

When you defend against a flame, you are acting like the person meant the flame. Better to just pretend they didn't mean. View reality a particular way (a framing) that's good for you and stick to it no matter what and lots of weaker ppl will see things your way. Hell, most of the time ppl flame you in social semi-jokey ways they don't even know if they mean it, they don't think about that, and they're partly testing you, so if you assume they don't mean it then they will often decide they didn't find a weak point and the flame was wrong.

>In February 1942, as Japanese forces tightened their grip on the Philippines, MacArthur was ordered by President Roosevelt to relocate to Australia.[148] On the night of 12 March 1942, MacArthur and a select group that included his wife Jean, son Arthur, and Arthur's Cantonese amah, Ah Cheu, fled Corregidor. MacArthur and his party reached Del Monte Airfield on Mindanao, where B-17s picked them up, and flew them to Australia.[149][150] His famous speech, in which he said, "I came through and I shall return", was first made on Terowie railway station in South Australia, on 20 March.[151] Washington asked MacArthur to amend his promise to "We shall return". He ignored the request.[152]

>But one always-fascinating source is Liberty’s decennial readers’ survey (No, not that Liberty, and not that one either. This one). First in 1988, then again in 1999, and finally in 2008 (before the magazine’s demise as a print periodical in 2010), Liberty published the results of an extensive survey of their readers and other libertarians. In each of these surveys, respondents were asked to provide demographic information, name their intellectual influences, say whether they agreed or disagreed with various moral, political, and religious beliefs, and analyze a handful of applied moral problems.

> For instance, in 1988, the survey asked a pair of questions about a scenario labeled, “How much is that baby in the window?”

>> Suppose that a parent of a new-born baby places it in front of a picture window and sells tickets to anyone wishing to observe the child starve to death. He makes it clear that the child is free to leave at any time, but that anyone crossing his lawn will be viewed as trespassing.

> The questions asked were, 1) Would you cross the lawn and help the child? And 2) Would helping the child violate the parents’ rights?

> In 1988, 89% of respondents said they would cross the lawn. 26% said that doing so would violate the parents’ rights. In 1999 those numbers were 87% and 31%, respectively. And in 2008 they were 90.9% and 24.1%.

>> Suppose that you are on a friend’s balcony on the 50th floor of a condominium complex. You trip, stumble and fall over the edge. You catch a flagpole on the next floor down. The owner opens his window and demands you stop trespassing.

> In 1988, 84% of respondents said they believed that in such circumstances they should enter the owner’s residence against the owner’s wishes. 2% (one respondent) said that they should let go and fall to their death, and 15% said they should hang on and wait for somebody to throw them a rope. In 1999, the numbers were 86%, 1%, and 13%. In 2008, they were 89.2%, 0.9%, and 9.9%.

> The questions asked were, 1) Would you cross the lawn and help the child? And 2) Would helping the child violate the parents’ rights?

Terrible survey design. I would not cross the lawn and help the child. Because, duh, *I'm not a cop*. I'd call the fucking cops to do that. I absolutely shouldn't take law enforcement into my own hands. The people writing this have no fucking concept of law and order, and putting the use of force under objective controls. The moment they see a child in a window who will die in a e.g. 2 weeks, they think its time for vigilante action?

(Normally I might call child protective services or something like that instead of the cops, but, given the threat to treat people as trespassers, I think some cops better come.)

Also what kind of idiot thinks it violates the parents' rights and would do it anyway?

Also you omitted any statement of what you think, presumably to evade the possibility of criticism (ineffectively since I just criticized the method itself).

>> The questions asked were, 1) Would you cross the lawn and help the child? And 2) Would helping the child violate the parents’ rights?

> Terrible survey design. I would not cross the lawn and help the child. Because, duh, *I'm not a cop*. I'd call the fucking cops to do that. I absolutely shouldn't take law enforcement into my own hands. The people writing this have no fucking concept of law and order, and putting the use of force under objective controls. The moment they see a child in a window who will die in a e.g. 2 weeks, they think its time for vigilante action?

Gp.

> (Normally I might call child protective services or something like that instead of the cops, but, given the threat to treat people as trespassers, I think some cops better come.)

> Also what kind of idiot thinks it violates the parents' rights and would do it anyway?

Lots of people think rights contradict. I can see someone thinking they're violating the parents' property rights but that the parents don't have a right to kill their kid, and so helping the kid is overall doing the right thing cuz life > property, something like that.

> Also you omitted any statement of what you think, presumably to evade the possibility of criticism (ineffectively since I just criticized the method itself).

i was looking for examples of libertarians engaging in rationalism and specifically applying the NAP in silly ways. i thought the survey results indicated some people doing that.

your comment regarding survey design is helpful cuz it points out a meta level disengagement from reality. the very framing of the choices of the survey was unrealistic.

> Also you omitted any statement of what you think, presumably to evade the possibility of criticism (ineffectively since I just criticized the method itself).

this is what i had written as commentary before posting the quotes from survey:

There’s some ambiguity in the question (do the respondents think they’re violating the parent’s property rights or parental rights or some other rights?) but the focus seems to be on property rights. Property rights are about ensuring that I get to dispose of the fruits of my labor according to my own judgment. This is necessary for me to have any liberty or indeed to have a life at all. If the fruits of my labor are disposed of according to someone else’s judgment, I have no control over my life, and might even starve at their whim.

Property rights don’t extend to using your property to murder people. For example, I can’t assert my property right in a gun and bullets as a defense if I shoot an innocent person. The gun and bullets were purchased with the fruit of my labor and can be used in certain situations (self defense, shooting targets at a range) and not others.

But a significant number of libertarians took a conception of rights unmoored from the purposes of those rights and unmoored from reality, and used that conception of rights to say that they’d be violating the parents’ rights if they stopped parents from cruelly starving a baby to death. By the way, I think it’s interesting that there were a decent number of people who thought helping the child would violate the parents’ rights but did it anyways. It’s good that they didn’t let their rationalism permit them to condone murder, but OTOH, lacking resolution to those sorts of moral quandaries is part of what causes people to give up on serious intellectual thinking. So it’s a very serious issue.

> i was looking for examples of libertarians engaging in rationalism and specifically applying the NAP in silly ways. i thought the survey results indicated some people doing that.

that is what you should say along with the link. that's a huge amount of context compared to none. it could say your opinion more clearly (i can figure out you'd save the child but better to say that directly).